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V6 riATT'S POEMS 





LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 

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UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



A VOYAGE TO THE FORTUNATE ISLES- 

ETC. 



MRS. PIATT'S SELECT POEMS 



A VOYAGE TO THE FORTUNATE ISLES 
AND OTHER POEMS 



SARAH M: BnPIATT 

AUTHOR OF ' A WOMAN'S POEMS,* ' AN IRISH GARLAND,' ETC. 



33 




BOSTON 

HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO. 

NEW YORK : ii EAST SEVENTEENTH STREET 

1886 



O'^^'^X 



76 ^^^» 

V4 



Copyright, 1885, 
By HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO. 



MY NEAREST NEIGHBOUR. 



Loved as myself— and more ! 

This book is yours, not mine, to give or take. 
Tour hand, not mine, has sent it from your door. 

My heart goes with it— only for your sake. 



CONTENTS 



Dedication, 






V 


Narrative Pieces : — 


A Voyage to the Fortunate Isles, . . 3 


"Folded Hands," 




10 


The Longest Death-Watch, 






12 


Two Veils, 






17 


Tradition of Conquest, . 






19 


The Black Princess, 






21 


Aunt Annie, 






24 


Life or Love, 






27 


Two Blush-Eoses, 






29 


The Gift of Empty Hands, 






31 


The King's Memento Mori, 






33 


The Brother's Hand, 






34 


The Last Angel, . 




51 


Dramatic Persons and Moods :— 


The Fancy Ball, .... 


55 


Twelve Hours Apart, 






56 


A Lily of the Nile, 






58 


There was a Rose, 






60 


If I were a Queen, 






62 



Viii CONTENTS. 








PAGE 


Sometime, ..... 68 


The Order for her Portrai 


t, 






70 


The Clothes of a Ghost, 








71 


FKght, . 








73 


Marble or Dust ? . 








75 


Their Lost Picture, 








77 


The Palace-Burner, 








78 


A Masked Ball, . 








80 


A Doubt, . 








82 


A Woman's Birthday, 








84 


Comfort— By a Coffin, 








86 


We Two, . 








88 


Enchanted, 








89 


The Altar at Athens, 








91 


Her Cross and Mine, 








92 


Two in Two Worlds, 








94 


Caprice at Home, 








96 


A Wall Between, 








98 


A Lesson in a Picture, 








108 


From Two Windows, 








110 


Denied, . 








111 


After the Quarrel, 








113 


The Descent of the Angel 








115 


Double Quatrains, 








116 


In Company with Children 


— 


After Wings, 


125 


Baby or Bird ? 


126 


My Babes in the Wood, 


127 


My Ghost, 








129 



CONTENTS. 


IX 




PAGE 


The End of the Rainbow, 


131 


The Highest Mountain, . 


132 


Playing Beggars, .... 


133 


A Child's First Sight of Snow, . 


136 


Last Words, .... 


136 


My Artist, .... 


138 


The Sad Story of a Little Girl, . 


141 


At Hans Andersen's Funeral, 


143 


A Coat-of-Arms, . . . . 


146 


Hiding the Baby, 


150 


The Little Boy I Dreamed about. 


153 


Calling the Dead, 


156 


The Lamb in the Sky, 


157 


"I Want it Yesterday," . 


158 


Into the World and Out, 


158 


The Baby's Brother, 


159 


Child's-Faith, 


160 


The Funeral of a Doll, . 


161 


One Year Old, .... 


163 


About a Magician, 


164 


Forgiveness, . . . . , 


165, 


Everything, . . . . . 


166 


Little Christian's Trouble, 


167 


Midsummer Night Fairies, 


168 


Miscellaneous :— 




Hearing the Battle, 


171 


To-day, 


172 


Shapes of a Soul, .... 


174 


Stone for a Statue, . . . . 


175 



CONTENTS. 



" I wish that I could go," 




PAGE 

176 


Counting the Graves, 




179 


A Dead Man's Friends, . 




181 


His Share and Mine, 




182 


The Bird in the Brain, . 




184 


A Prettier Book, . 




186 


Asking for Tears, 




188 


"A Letter from To-morrow," 




189 


The Dead Book, . 




192 


Songs :— 






Eeproof to a Rose, 


. 


195 


When the Full Moon's Light is Burning, 


196 


The Song no Bird should Sing 


in Vain, . 


197 


Come, Wailing Winds ; come. 


Birds of Night, 


198 


Sad Spring- Song, . 




199 


Say the Sweet Words, 




200 


Fulfilment, 




201 


Good-bye, 




202 


Life and Death, . 




20.3 


Making Peace, 




204 


Sweet World, if you will hear me noiv, 


205 



NARRATIVE PIECES. 



A VOYAGE TO THE FOETUNATE ISLES. 

THE FABLE OF A HOUSEHOLD. 

" Yes, but I fear to leave the shore. 

So fierce, so shadowy, so cold, 
Deserts of water lie before — 

Whose secrets night has never told, 
Save in close whispers to the dead. 
I fear," one vaguely said. 

One answered : " Will you waver here 1 
As wild and lonesome as the things 

Which hold their wet nests, year by year, 
In these poor rocks, are we. Their wings 

Grow restless — wherefore not our feet 1 
That which is strange is sweet." 

" That which we know is sweeter yet. 
Do we not love the near Earth more 



A VOYAGE TO THE FORTUNATE ISLES. 

Than the far Heaven 'i Does not Regret 

Walk with us, always, from the door 
That shuts behind us, though we leave 
Not much to make us grieve 1 " 

" Why fret me longer, when you know 
Our hands with thorny toil are torn ? 

Scant bread and bitter, heat and snow, 
Rude garments, souls too blind and worn 

To climb to Christ for comfort : these 
Are here. And there — the Seas. 

''True, our great Lord will let us drink 
At some wild springs, and even take 

A few slight dew-flowers. But, I think, 
He cares not how our hearts may ache. 

He comes not to the peasant's hut 
To learn — the door is shut. 

" Oh, He is an hard Master. Still 
In His rough fields, for piteous hire, 

To break dry clods is not my will. 
I thank Him that my arms can tire. 

Let thistles henceforth grow like grain, 
To mock His sun and rain. 



A VOYAGE TO THE FORTUNATE ISLES. 

" Others He lifts to high estate — 
Others, no peers of yours or mine. 

He folds them in a silken fate. 

Casts pearls before them — oh, the swine ! 

Drugs them with wine, veils them with lace ; 
And gives us this mean place." 

'* Well. May there not be butterflies 
That lift with weary wings the air ; 

That loathe the foreign sun, which lies 
On all their colours like despair ; 

That glitter, home-sick for the form 
And lost sleep of the worm 1 " 

" Hush — see the ship. It comes at last," 
She whispered, through forlornest smiles : 

" How brave it is ! It sails so fast. 
It takes us to the Fortunate Isles. 

Come." Then the heart's great silence drew 
Like Death around the Two. 

Death-like it was — through pain and doubt, 
To leave their world at once and go, 

Pale, mute, and even unconscious, out 

Throu«fh dimness toward some distant Glow, 



A VOYAGE TO THE FORTUNATE ISLES. 

That might be but Illusion caught 
In the fine net of Thought. 

As ghosts, led by a ghostly sleep — 

Followed by Life, a breathless dream — 

Out in eternal dusk, that keep 
Their way somewhere, these Two did seem, 

Till the sea-moon climbed to her place 
And looked in each still face. 

" The worm," she waking said, '•' must long 

To put on beauty and to fly, 
But " coming toward them sad and strong, 

There was a little double cry. 
" What hurts the children ? They should rest, 
In such a floating nest." 

"Oh, Mother, look — we all are gone. 

Our house is swimming in the sea. 
It will not stop. It keeps right on. 

How far away we all must be ! 
The wind has blown it from the cliff. 
It rocks us like a skiff. 

"We all will drown but Baby. He 
Is in his pretty grave so far. 



A VOYAGE TO THE FORTUNATE ISLES. 

He has to sleep till Judgment. We 

Must sink where all the sailors are, 
Who used to die, when storms would come, 
Away off from their home." 

" Lie still, you foolish yellow heads. 

This is a ship. We 're sailing." " Where V 
" Go nestle in your little beds. 

Be quiet. We shall soon be there." 
" Where ?" " Why, it is not many miles. " 
" Where V "To the Fortunate Isles." 

" Home is the best. Oh, what a light ! 

God must be looking in the sea. 
It is His glass. He makes it bright 

All over with His face. And He 
Is angry. He is talking loud 
Out of that broken cloud. 

" The men all hear Him, in the ropes : 
He 's telling them the ship must go. 

They 'd better climb to Him." Pale Hopes 
Looked from each wretched breast, to know 

If somewhere, through the shattered night, 
One sail could be in sight. 



8 A VOYAGE TO THE FORTUNATE ISLES. 

And Two, who waited, dying slow, 
Said, clinging to their desperate calm : 

" We had not thought such wind could blow 
Out of the warm leaves of the palm. 

Strange, with the Fortunate Isles so nigh — 
Strange, cruel, thus to die." 

"The Fortunate Isles ?" one other cried; 

" You knew we were not sailing there ? 
They lie far back across the tide. 

Their cliffs are grey and wet and bare ; 
And quiet people in their soil 
Are still content to toil. 

*' Toward shining snakes, toward fair dumb birds, 

Toward Fever hiding in the spice, 
We voyaged." But his tropic words 

Dropped icy upon hearts of ice. 
The lonesome gulf to which they passed 
Had shown the Truth at last. 

That wavering glare the drowning see, 
With phantoms of their life therein. 

Flashed on them both. Yet mostly she 
Felt all her sorrow, all her sin. 



A VOYAGE TO THE FORTUNATE ISLES. 9 

And learned, most bitterly, how dear 
Their crags and valleys were. 

Their home, whose dim wet windows stared 

Through drops of brine, like eyes through tears ; 

The blue ground-blossoms that had cared 
To creep about their feet for years ; 

And their one grave so deep, so small — 
Sinking, they saw them all ! 

To leave the Fortunate Isles, away 

On the other side of the world, and sail 

Still further from them, day by day, 
Dreaming to find them ; and to fail 

In knowing, till the very last, 

They held one's own sweet Past : 

Such lot was theirs. Such lot will be. 
Ah, much I fear me, yours and mine. 

Because our air is cold, and we 
See Summer in some mirage shine, 

We leave the Fortunate Isles behind, 
The Fortunate Isles to find. 



10 FOLDED HANDS. 



"FOLDED HANDS." 

THE STORY OF A PICTURE. 

Madonna eyes looked at him from the air, 
But never from the picture. Still he painted. 

The hovering halo would not touch the hair ; 
The patient saint still stared at him — unsainted. 

Day after day flashed by in flower and frost ; 

Night after night, how fast the stars kept burning 
His little light away, till all was lost ! — 

All, save the bitter sweetness of his yearning. 

Slowly he saw his work : it was not good. 

Ah, hopeless hope ! Ah, fiercely-dying passion ! 
*' I am no painter," moaned he as he stood, 

With folded hands in death's unconscious fashion. 

" Stand as you are, an instant ! " some one cried. 

He felt the voice of a diviner brother. 
The man who was a painter, at his side. 

Showed how his folded hands could serve another. 



FOLDED HANDS. 11 

Ah, strange, sad world, where Albert Diirer takes 
The hands that Albert Diirer's friend has folded, 

And with their helpless help such triumph makes ! — 
Strange, since both men of kindred dust were 
moulded. 



12 THE LONGEST DEATH-WATCH. 



THE LONGEST DEATH- WATCH.i 

The woman is a picture now. 

The Spanish suns have touched her face ; 

The coil of gold upon her brow 
Shines back on an Imperial race 
With most forlorn and bitter grace. 

Old palace-lamps behind her burn, 
The ermine moulders on her train. 

Her ever-constant eyes still yearn 

For one who came not back to Spain ; 
And dim and hollow is her brain. 

One only thing she knew in life, 
Four hundred ghostly years ago — 

That she was Flemish Philip's wife. 
Nor much beyond she cared to know ; 
Without a voice she tells me so. 

^ Joanna, the wife of Philip the Handsome, was the 
daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella, sister of Catherine of 
Aragon, and mother of the Emperor Charles v. 



THE LONGEST DEATH-WATCH. 13 

Philip the Beautiful — whose eyes 
Might win a woman's heart, I fear, 

Even from his grave ! "He will arise," 
The monks had murmured by his bier, 
"And reign once more among us here." 



She heard their whisper, and forgot 
Castile and Aragon, and all 

Save Philip, who had loved her not ; 
The cruel darkness of his pall 
Seemed on an empty world to fall. 



She took the dead man — to her sight 
A prince in death's disguise, as fair 

As when his wayward smile could liglit 
The throne he wedded her to share — 
And followed, hardly knowing where. 



Almost as dumb as he, she fled, 

Pallid and wasted, toward the place 

Where he, the priestly promise said. 

Must wait the hour when God's sweet grace 
Should breathe into his breathless face. 



14 THE LONGEST DEATH-WATCH. 

Once, when the night was weird Avith rain, 
She sought a convent's shelter. When 

The tapers showed a veiled train 
Of nuns, instead of cowl6d men, 
She stole into the night again : 



" These women, sainted though they be," 
She moaned through all her jealous mind, 

" Are women still, and shall not see 
Philip the Fair — though he is blind ! 
Favour with him I yet shall find." 



Then, with her piteous yearning wild : 
"Unclose his coffin quick, I pray." 

Fiercely the sudden lightning smiled — 
When they had laid the lid away — 
Like scorn, upon the regal clay. 



She kissed the dead of many days. 
As though he were an hour asleep. 

Dark men with swords to guard her way 
Wept for her — but she did not weep ; 
She had her vigil still to keep. 



THE LONGEST DEATH- WAT(;H. 15 

Tliey reached the appointed cloister. While 
The heart of Philip withering lay, 

She, without moan, or tear, or smile, 

Watched from her window, legends say — 
Watched seven-and-forty years away ! 



Winds blew the blossoms to and fro, 
Into the world and out again : 

" He will come back to me, I know" — 
Poor whisper of a wandering brain 
To peerless patience, peerless pain ! 



. . . Ah, longest, loneliest, saddest tryst 
Was ever kept on earth ! And yet 

Had he arisen would he have kissed 
The grey wan woman he had met, 
Or — taught her how the dead forget ? 



Could she have won, discrowned and old, 
The love she could not win, in sooth. 

When queenly purple, fold on fold. 
And all the subtle grace of youth. 
Helped her to hide a hapless truth 1 



16 THE LONGEST DEATH-WATCH. 

Did she not fancy — should she see 

That coffin, watched so long, unclose — 

The royal tenant there would be 
Still young, still fair, when he arose, 
Beside her withered leaves and snows 1 



He would have laughed to breathe the tale 
Of this crazed stranger's love, I fear, 

To moon and rose and nightingale, 
With courtly jewels glimmering near, 
Into some lovely lady's ear. 



TWO VEILS. 17 



TWO VEILS. 

From the nun's wan life a buried passion 
Blossomed like a grave-rose in her face ; 

"Sweet, my child," she said, "in what fair fashion 
Do you mean to wear this lovely lace 1 

"Thus ? " — and, with a feverish hand and shaken, 
Eound her head the precious veil she wound. 

"Faith in man," she said, " I have forsaken ; 
Faith in God most surely I have found. 

" Yet with music in the dewy distance, 
And the whole world flowering at my feet, 

Through this convent-garment's dark resistance 
Backward I can hear my fierce heart beat. 

" Tropic eyes too full of light and languor, 
Northern soul too grey with Northern frost : 

Ashes — ashes after fires of anger ! 

Love and beauty — what a world I lost !" 

B 



18 TWO VEILS. 

** Sister," laughed the girl with girlish laughter, 

** Sister, do you envy me my veil "?" 
' You may come to ask for mine hereafter," 

Answered very piteous lips and pale. 

" No, for your black cross is heavy bearing ; 

Tiresome counting these stone beads must be. 
Oh, but there are jewels worth the wearing 

Waiting in the sunny world for me ! 

..." Sister, have a care — you are forgetting. 

Do not broider thorns among my flowers — 
Only buds and leaves : your tears are wetting 

All my bridal lace." They fell in showers. 

After years and years, beside the grating, 

(Oh, that saddest sight, young hair grown grey !) 

With dry boughs and empty winds awaiting 
At the cloister door, came one to pray. 

" Sister, see my bride-veil ! there was never 
Thorn so sharp as those within its lace. 

Sister, give me yours to wear for ever ; 
Give me yours, and let me hide my face." 



TRADITION OF CONQUEST. 19 



TRADITION OF CONQUEST. 

His Grace of Marlborough, legends say, 
Though battle-lightnings proved his worth, 

Was scathed like others, in his day. 
By fiercer fires at his own hearth. 

The patient chief, thus sadly tried — 
Madam, the Duchess, was so fair- 
In Blenheim's honours felt less pride 
Than in the lady's lovely hair. 

Once, (shorn, she had coiled it there to wound 
Her lord when he should pass, 'tis said,) 

Shining across his path he found 
The glory of the woman's head. 

No sudden word, nor sullen look, 

In all his after days, confessed 
He missed the charm whose absence took 

A scar's pale shape within his breast. 



20 TRADITION OF CONQUEST. 

I think she longed to have him blame, 
And soothe him with imperious tears : — 

As if her beauty were the same, 

He praised her through his courteous years. 

But, when the soldier's arm was dust, 
Among the dead man's treasures, where 

He laid it as from moth and rust. 

They found his wayward wife's sweet hair. 



THE BLACK PRINCESS. 21 



THE BLACK PRINCESS. 

A TRUE FABLE OF MY OLD KENTUCKY NURSE. 

I KNEW a Princess : she was old, 

Crisp-haired, flat-featured, with a look 

Such as no dainty pen of gold 
Would write of in a Fairy Book. 

So bent she almost crouched, her face 
Was like the Sphinx's face, to me. 

Touched with vast patience, desert grace, 
And lonesome, brooding mystery. 

What wonder that a faith so strong 

As hers, so sorrowful, so still, 
Should watch in bitter sands so long, 

Obedient to a burdening will ! 

This Princess was a Slave — like one 

I read of in a painted tale ; 
Yet free enough to see the sun. 

And all the flowers, without a veil. 



22 THE BLACK PRINCESS. 

Not of the Lamp, not of the King, 
The helpless, powerful Slave was she, 

But of a subtler, fiercer Thing : 
She was the Slave of Slaver}'. 

Court-lace nor jewels had she seen : 
She wore a precious smile, so rare 

That at her side the whitest queen 
Were dark — her darkness was so fair. 

Nothing of loveliest loveliness 

This strange, sad Princess seemed to lack ; 
Majestic with her calm distress 

She was, and beautiful though black : 

Black, but enchanted black, and shut 
In some vague Giant's tower of air, 

Built higher than her hope was. But 

The True Knight came and found her there. 



The Knight of the Pale Horse, he laid 
His shadowy lance against the spell 

That hid her Self : as if afraid. 

The cruel blackness shrank and fell. 



THE BLACK PRINCESS. 23 

Then, lifting slow her pleasant sleep, 

He took her with him through the night, 

And swam a Eiver cold and deep, 
And vanished up an awful Height. 

And, in her Father's House beyond, 
They gave her beauty robe and crown •; 

On me, I think, far, faint, and fond, 

Her eyes to-day look, yearning, down. 



24 AUNT ANNIE. 



AUNT ANNIE. 

The old house has, for being sweet, 
Some sweeter reason than the rose 

Which, red or white, about the feet 
Of many a nested home-bird grows. 

And sadder reason than the rain 
On the quaint porch, for being sad, 

(Oh, human pity, human pain !) 
The old house, in its shadows, had. 

I sat within it as a guest, 

I who went from it as a wife ; — 

The young days there, though not the best, 
Had been the fairest of my life : 

For love itself must ever seem 

More precious, to our restless youth, 

When hovering subtly in its dream 

Tlmn when we touch its nestling truth. 



AUNT ANNIE. 25 

I sat there as a guest, I said — 

Holding the loveliest boy on earth, 

With his fair, sleepy, yellow head 
Close to the pleasant shining hearth. 

He laughed out in his sleep, and I 

Laughed too, and kissed him — when I heard 
A wise and very cautious sigh ; 

And once again the dimples stirred. 

Aunt Annie looked at him awhile ; 

Then shook her head at her own fears. 
With more of sorrow in her smile 

Than I could ever put in tears. 



" He is a pretty boy I know — 
The prettiest in the world ? Ah, me 

One other, fifty years ago, 
Was quite as pretty, dear, as he. 



" Now I am eighty. Twenty-five 
Are gone since last we heard from James. 

I sometimes think he is alive." 

She hushed, and looked into the flames. 



26 AUNT ANNIE. 

''He used to tell me, when a child, 
Of far, strange countries, where they say 

The flowers bloom all the year " — she smiled — • 
"I can't believe it, to this day ! 

" And still I think he may have crossed 
The sea — and stayed the other side. 

His letters may have all been lost — 

Who knows ? Who knows 1 The world is wide. 

'* I often think, if you could know 

How much he makes me think of him, 

You 'd guess why I love Victor so." 
Again the troubled eyes were dim. 

" If your child, such a night, were out 
Lost in this dark and snow and sleet, 

You would go wild, I do not doubt." 
I almost heard her own heart beat. 

" Yet long, on stormier nights than this, 
Mine has been out — why should I care 

How many a winter now it is ? 

Mine has been out — and He knows where." 



LIFE OR LOVE. 27 



LIFE OR LOVE. 



" Oh, world so beautiful, could we hide 
Somewhere in your flowers from death ! " 

A wandering voice in a palace sighed. 
Where the East-rose draws her breath. 

" Ah, jewels have passed through yon fires of mine, 

"Worth Persia ten times told ; 
And the essence that makes our dust divine 

Is here in this cup of gold :" 

And the Master knelt with a beard that rushed 

To his feet like a storm of snow. 
But Youth in his bosom yearned and flushed, 

And Youth in his voice spake low. 

Yet the queen lay dark on the gorgeous floor. 

With her eyes hid in her hair. 
" Should she lift her face from the dust any more/' 

They moaned, " it will not be fair : 

" All night, with the moon, she watches and weeps ; 
No song in her ear is sweet. 



28 LIFE OR LOVE. 

All day, like the dead king's shadow, she keeps 
Her place at the dead king's feet." 

"Your beauty is worth all other things 

The insolent gods have seen. 
It should not fade — for a thousand kings. 

You shall be for ever the queen." 

And closer the Master held the charm : 
"It is Life, O queen, that I bring." 

She reached the cup with a wandering arm : 
"Is it Life — for my lord, the king V 

" Nay, the king will not drink wine to-day. 

There is one drop here — for you. 
Oh, listen, and keep your beauty, I pray. 

While the sweet world keeps the dew. 

" For you, new lovers shall always rise ; " 
And the lords and the princes near, 

With the sunrise-light in their Persian eyes, 
Stood, jewelled and still, to hear. 

" Oh, what were Life to the lonely — what ? 

It is Love I would have you bring, 
And Love in this widowed world is not. 

Let me go to my lord, the king." 



TWO BLUSH-ROSES. 29 



TWO BLUSH-ROSES. 

A BLUSH-ROSE lay in the summer ; 

There were golden lights in the sky, 
And a woman saw the blossom, 

As she stood with her lover nigh. 

A band in the flowering distance 

Played a dreamy Italian air, 
Like a memory changed to music, 

And it drifted everywhere. 

*Twas an exiled love of its Southland, 
That air, and its delicate wails 

Were only the wandering echoes 
Of the songs of nightingales. 

"I love you," he tenderly whispered ; 

"I love you," she answered as low : 
And the music grew sweeter and sweeter, 

Because it had listened, I know. 



30 TWO BLUSH-ROSES. 

But she looked at the rose in the summer, 
And said, with a tremulous tear, 

" The love that now beats in my bosom 
Will bloom in a blush-rose next year." 

A blush-rose lay in the summer ; 

There were golden lights in the sky. 
And a woman saw the blossom, 

As she stood with her lover nigh. 

The band in the flowering distance 

Played the dreamy Italian air, 
Like a memory changed to music, 

And it drifted everywhere. 

^'I love you," he tenderly whispered; 

" I love you," she timidly said . 
And the music grew sadder and sadder, 

And the blush-rose before them dropped dead. 

Then he knew that the music remembered, 
And knew the love that had beat 

Last year in her beautiful bosom 
Lay dead in the rose at his feet. 



THE GIFT OF EMPTY HANDS. 31 



THE GIFT OF EMPTY HANDS. 

A FAIRY TALE. 

They were two princes doomed to death ; 
Each loved his beauty and his breath : 
" Leave us our life, and we will bring 
Fair gifts unto our lord, the King." 

They went together. In the dew 
A charmed bird before them Hew. 
Through sun and thorn one followed it ; 
Upon the other's arm it lit. 

A rose, whose faintest flush was worth 
All buds that ever blew on earth, 
One climbed the rocks to reach ; ah ! well, 
Into the other's breast it fell. 

AVeird jewels, such as fairies wear. 
When moons go out, to light their hair. 
One tried to touch on ghostly ground ; 
Gems of quick fire the other found. 



32 THE GIFT OF EMPTY HANDS. 

One with the dragon fought, to gain 
The enchanted fruit, and fought in vain ; 
The other breathed the garden's air, 
And gathered precious apples there. 

Backward to the imperial gate 

One took his fortune, one his fate ; 

One showed sweet gifts from sweetest lands ; 

The other torn and empty hands. 

At bird, and rose, and gem, and fruit. 
The King was sad, the King was mute. 
At last he slowly said : " My son 
True treasure is not lightly won. 

" Your brother's hands, wherein you see 
Only these scars, show more to me 
Than if a kingdom's price I found 
In place of each forgotten wound." 



THE king's memento MORI. 33 



THE KING'S MEMENTO MORI. 

Into the regal face the risen sun 

Laughed, and he whispered in dismay : 

"How is it, Victor of the World, that none 
Remind you what you are, to-day 'i 

" Your sword shall teach the slave, who could forget 

That men are mortal, what they are ! 
How dared he sleep, — he has not Avarned me yet, — 

After that last, loth, lagging star ? " 

. . . Across his palace threshold, wan and still, 

His morning herald, wet with dew, 
Stared at him with fixed eyes that well might chill 

The vanity of earth clean through. 

" Good-morrow, King," he heard the dead lips say, 

" See what is man. When did I tell 
My bitter message to my lord, I pray. 

So reverently and so well ? " 



34: THE brother's HAND. 



THE BEOTHER'S HAND. 

[Time : The Civil War, 1861-1868.] 

Here, see what I have brought you from the hill — 

A brier-rose lingering late into July. 
Oh, it may tell you, if it can and will, 

In its small way, so pink and timid, why 
It waited after all its mates were dead. 
And wore for mourning-garments only red 

While its step-mother month was fierce and dry. 



There is no flower with look and bloom and breath, 
I fondly fancy, like the faint brier-rose ; 

No flower so fair for life, so sweet for death, 
That in the dew or in the darkness grows ; 

No flower that has so faerily heard and seen 

What faery things the hum and honey mean, 
When in the wind the bee about it blows. 



THE brother's HAND. 35 

Far off, by black-grey stone, in shattered heaps, 
The beautiful, familiar, sad home-grace. 

Like love itself made palpable, it keeps 
Through all the sorrowful forsaken place. 

Nor can you find the scented presence there. 

On the green ground or in the pensive air, 
Of any other of the blossoming race. 



A very lovely woman loved to wear 

Its cluster of blushes once upon her breast. 

She brought it from the woods and set it where 
She always loved to be, herself, the best. 

The very flowers we think so frail outstay 

Our frailer selves — and she is gone away : 
Away — and, therefore, as we think, to rest. 



On the seventh birthday of her fair twin-boys, 
She gave the two a boat, as they were one, 

(For until then each owned the other's toys) ; 
But when they saw it floating in the sun. 

With sails of stained silk so prettily blown, 

Each felt that he was now himself alone : 

The golden chain that bound them was undone. 



36 THE brother's hand. 

" No, it is mine," each to the other said, 
And one raised up an angry arm and made 

A quick wide wound, that looked so strange and red 
Each of the other dimly felt afraid. 

Then a child-Cain in shadowy terror stood, 

And, crying from the ground, his brother's blood 
Rose from the pleasant shore where they had played. 



That sharp, swift cut had cleft the two apart. 

And, under his light, lovely hair, one wore 
A strange-shaped scar. And in the other's heart, 

A heart that had been very sweet before. 
The snake-like passions started from their sleep 
And over it began to writhe and creep. 

And so the two were two for evermore. 



As they grew older, he who wore the scar 
Saw it was like a hand — his brother's hand, 

It seemed, against him. Then he went afar 
With a kind kinsman to a colder land, 

After he heard the dust begin to fall 

On his young mother's coffin. She was all 
He had dear. And she was what the shadows are. 



THE BROTHER'S HAND. 37 

Elue-eyed and stately, with a bright, brave scorn 
Of wrong, he in a calmer climate grew. 

The other, tropic-nursed as tropic-born, 
Was fierce and swarthy, and imperious too, 

And restless as the wind that bloweth where 

It listeth : so he wandered here and there. 
And neither of the other clearly knew. 



At last there came a heavy hail of lead 

Out of the Northern sky, that Southward fell. 

The fields were blasted and the men lay dead ; 
The women moaned ; and flying shapes of shell 

Their ways from roof to hearth-stone madly tore. 

And opened suddenly the deserted door, 
By the brier-roses guarded once so well. 



And Euin glided up the weedy path. 

And crossed the mouldy threshold and went in, 

And sat there, with a sort of a sullen wrath, 
Gathering about her all that once had been 

Dear and familiar — save the rose, beside 

The crumbling porch, from which she vainly tried. 
Tearing her hands with thorns, the flowers to win. 



38 THE brother's hand. 

And once, when a great ghastly Sight close by 
Was terrible in the stillness of the moon, 

A tall, slight soldier, with a smothered cry. 

Crept close and broke some buds and vani-shed soon; 

But, with an almost human joy-in-grief. 

The desolate rose-tree thrilled from root to leaf 
When he said wearily : "Yes — it is I." 



A whole year more, when summer flushed again, 
Near to the same place, in the glitter of heat, 

(The earth was red, the sky was smoky then,) 
One lay in agony. Against his feet 

A gashed and gory flag from its shot stafi" 

Fluttered and fell. There was a cruel laugh 
From one he had not feared again to meet ; 



And a swift horse, deep-black, with foaming mouth 
And angry eyes full of wild wonder, sprung 

From its light rider — one who loved the South 
With his whole bitter soul. And, as he flung 

The reins away and stood in tears beside 

The dying creature, gentle, till it died. 

He showed that he was desperate, dark, and younj 



THE brother's HAND. 39 

There was a beautiful and dreadful charm 
About that youthful captain, as he stood 

Bare-headed, swordless, with his dead right arm 
Loose at his side, his left, whose strength was good, 

About his horse — forgetting his own wound, 

Forgetting all the horrible things around — 
Calling it all the tender names he could. 



But when his horse was gone, he turned away 
And stamped the fallen flag and cursed, and shook 

The tall, slight soldier in whose blood it lay, 
Till he half -raised himself with a dim look, 

That made the other loose his hateful hold 

And tremble for an instant and grow cold. 
As if his thought some deadly trouble took. 



Then he crept closer to the wounded youth 
And lifted, vaguely, his light lovely hair. 

And that strange scar — the brother's hand, in truth 
Against him — as in distant days was there. 

But now that brother looked at his distress 

With a remorse that changed to tenderness, 
And tried to raise him with a timid care. 



40 THE brother's HAND. 

And watched him many a moaning after-night, 
Through which the shine of spectral steel would go, 

Through which lost armies would rise up and fight 
Lost battles, in the air — then waver slow 

And haze-like down, and whiten toward the dust, 

Leaving behind a little blood and rust 

And glory. Glory 1 Why, I do not know. 



At last the War's fierce music left the wind, 
And they who answered to its infinite cries 

With their whole breath were gone where God can find 
Them, when He searches land and sea and skies • 

And Peace remained — a beautiful white veil, 

Wrought by hurt hands that dropped off thin and pale, 
To hide the tears in wan, wet, restless eyes. 



And the twin-brothers — one just from his wound — 
Talked of their brier-rose that would blossom yetj 

Talked of the river with its far-back sound, 
Talked of their mother with a still regret, 

And of the fairy boat she gave them both : 

And then a sudden silence showed them loth 
To talk of — what they did not quite forget. 



THE brother's HAND. 41 

Just then it happened that a pretty flash 

Of small Spring-lightning made their window bright : 

They saw a fluttering dress, a bright-plaid sash, 
A wide straw-hat, and loose hair falling quite 

Half-way to eager feet. And so they guessed, 

Each in a shy half-dreaming way, the rest : 

They thought the girl was lovely 1 They were right. 



Her face in glimpses came to haunt the two, 
Her voice was not what common voices are ; 

And soon the twin-born rivals darkly knew 

The old feud was not dead. They saw the scar 

Out of its dreary quiet rise again : 

The brother's hand was terrible and plain 
Against the brother, as in years afar. 



She loved them both. Which most ? I think that she- 
At least not yet — nor any other knew. 

Sometimes she walked with Frederick by the sea, 
Sometimes she sung a tremulous song to Hugh, 

And in a while, no doubt, began to know 

That he was handsome, or she thought him so, 
And that his eyes, perhaps, were frankly blue. 



42 THE brother's hand. 

Out with the darker brother once, a storm 
Broke sharply down the twilight. For a time 

She clung to him. But, dry again and warm, 
Among their lamps she sung a sobbing rhyme 

To her piano — and the gold-haired man — 

Whose desolate music ended and began 
With a far, subtle, creeping, sea-like chime. 



Then hushed and went half -tearful to her room, 
Asking herself but this : " Which shall I choose 1 

Have I the saddest need of light or gloom ? 
The fair one surely is too fair to lose : 

Without him half the world were empty, and 

Without his brother if I understand, 

The dark one is too dark to quite refuse. 



"And sometimes if I only glance at him, 
His richer, fiercer colour seems to me 

To make his stiller brother look as dim 
As a star looks by lightning. Let me be, 

My star, with the white constant light you shed ; 

Fade out, my lightning, or else strike me dead. 
For star and lightning can but ill agree." 



THE BROTHER'S HAND. 43 

But something startled her brown window-bird, 
Nested below in perfume. As it flew 

She heard her own name spoken, and she heard, 
Out in the wind, one ask : " Which of us two 'i 

It is not well that both of us should stay. 

Let her decide." In a bewildered way, 

Not knowing what she did, she whispered, "Hugh " 



They heard below, and Frederick seemed to laugh, 
And said : " My boy, our paths again divide. 

Your joy is great. If you could give me half, 
Enough were left. Good-bye. The world is wide. 

But all too narrow to hold you and me. 

Good-bye and shall we let the Future be ? 

Upon my faith you have a charming bride." 



Next morning he was gone. And then, somehow, 
Hugh chanced in his vexed dreamy way to throw 

The yellow hair from his unquiet brow, 

And started from a glass which seemed to show 

That fearful scar, looking more deadly-white. 

More like his brother's hand, too, since last night ; 
Then scarlet suddenly it seemed to grow. 



44 THE brother's HAND. 

She saw it : " Ah, you have a scar,'' she said. 

"How strange it is — and how much like a hand.' 
"It is a hand," he answered. " See how red 

It threatens now. It cut the gentle band 
Between us while we yet were children," " Who V 
" We twins that called each other Fred and Hugh, 

And played beside a river in the sand." 



A troubled paleness fell upon her face. 

She looked at him an instant. " If I may ?" 
She said, and, bird-like^ fluttered from her place, 

And flushed and doubted, and — I must not say 
She kissed the scar. But I can say it grew 
Yet deeper scarlet, and looked darker too. 

And seemed to move — motioning her away. 



. . . The leaf-bloom of the Autumn lit the woods- 
(The next day was to be their wedding-day). 

A cruel rain whirled down in pitiless floods 
And fretted the poor leaves that tried to stay 

And wear their splendour for a little yet. 

The butterflies were faded out and wet, 
Or else the wind had blown them all away. 



THE BROTHER S HAND. 45 

The crimson-curtained, pleasant parlour glowed 
With ferns and asters, and a sparkling fire ; 

The next-day's bride before the mirror shoM^ed 
The trailing mistiness of a bride's attire. 

And Hugh looked at her, smiling from his dream : 

He was not happy, quite, nor did he seem ; 
Yet such sweet vanity he must admire. 

She turned to take a letter that came in, 
And read it, and looked at him as she read, 

And threw it at his feet. " And be your sin," 
She hoarsely whispered, "upon your own head." 

"My sin ?" " See there, and — say it is not true." 

" I will not. All I say is this : if you 
Believe it — let to-morrow not begin I" 

Then there were angry words, and — " Let us part," 
She moaned, and reached to him her frightened 
hand. 

Thinking that he would hold it — to his heart — 
And kiss her pain away, as she had planned : 

For she forgave him — what he had not done. 

He answered : "As you please." And there was none 
To come between them, or to understa,nd. 



46 THE brother's HAND. 

AVhat then ? The thistles blew across the rain, 
The grey, wet thorn-tree glimmered once and shook. 

She thought : "If one should never come again — 
Should never come — after a bitter look ? " 

And — the dry asters from the mantel fell : 

She brought no fresh ones for the vases. Well ? 
And silence settled in his favourite book. 



She did not thin her beauty with her tears, 
But was she tearless 1 Doubtless she was not. 

But all the outward gladness of her years 
Was not because of one great grief forgot. 

Loose hair and laughter, singing quick and sweet, 

Followed about the green home-grass her feet, 
And quieted all wordless, kindly fears. 



She had no mother. But her father said 

"You are too hasty, little girl, I fear. 
Hugh is a manly fellow ; as for Fred 



The villain ! Hugh will come again, my dear, 
Before the fashion of your dress shall change. 
And we shall have our wedding." Was it strange ? 

The dress grew quaint. And Hugh did not appear. 



THE brother's HAND. 47 

Once at the sea-side, in an evening dance. 

She felt— and, fluttering, tried to fly away— 

The bird-like terror of the snake-like glance. 
Poor, charmed little thing— and must it stay 1 

^^ Frederick?" "Well— yes." "Where is your 
brother, Hugh 1 " 

•• Am I my brother's keeper ? Doubtless you 
Who wounded and deserted him, can say." 

Hurt and bewildered, then she brokenly tried 

The secret of his letter to recall. 
His letter ? With feigned anger he denied 

That he had Avritten— anything at all ! 
" What a mysterious piece of villainy ! 
Huo-h never could have thought so ill of me. 

He did not read it "? " Then he heard her fall. 



... It was the crowded room, and they must go 
Into the wide moonlighted air apart. 

Where was his brother, then 1 He said, to know 
He would give up the last throb of his heart ; 

It was two years or more since he had heard 

Of Hugh one word, one single precious word : 
Then broke into a cry that made her start. 



48 THE BROTHER'S HAND. 

By dim degrees he made himself grow dear, 
By seeming everything his brother was. 

Whatever in the other had been clear, 
In him she saw — darkly as in a glass. 

At last, in some weird, subtle way, he grew 

The shadow, or the very self, of Hugh. 

And — well, the Summer withered from the grass. 



What then ? The asters in the vases glowed 
Again ; the parlour held the shining fire 

Again ; the mirror, three years older, shoAved 
The trailing mistiness of a bride's attire ; 

And, this time, Frederick watched her from his dream. 

He was not happy, quite, nor did he seem, 
Yet such fair vanity he must admire. 

Once more the thistles blew across the rain, 

The grey, wet thorn-tree glimmered once and 
shook ; 

And then she thought : "If one should come again — 
Or should not come — after a bitter look ! " 

And then — a sudden voice, familiar-low. 

And phantom-sweet, but heavily-bent and slow, 
Read out the silence of the favourite book. 



THE BROTHER'S HAND. 49 

No matter. In a wedded year or two, 
In a far Western land a cottage rose, 

With sand and sea and sea-shell shining through 
Its many windows — so the story goes. 

Frederick was happy there. But his late bride 

Had backward-yearning eyes, and sometimes sighed 
A little — as all women may ? Who knows ? 



Once bitterly he asked : " What makes you sad V' 
She answered languidly : " Perhaps the sea. 

I sometimes think it surely has gone mad : 
It foams and mutters till it frightens me. 

Sometimes when it looks only golden, and 

All things look golden in this Golden Land, 
Blackly below it threatens things to be." 



And, as her childish words failed at her lip. 
From silks and spices and a foreign sail, 

She saw a man drop from a landing ship 
As heavily as he had been a bale 

Of precious merchant-freight. With the great light 

Of the great evening smitten, he was bright 
But all who looked at him were dull and pale. 

D 



50 THE brother's HAND. 

A lifeboat brought him strangHng to the coast. 

He motioned them, in a despairing way, 
To drown his body. For his soul was lost, 

He said : it shook him off and plunged away 
From the dark deck into the gulfs below, 
For utter lonehness. And he must go 

And find it, somewhere — for the Judgment Day. 

Then he died smiling. . . . Frederick and his wife 
Looked at him and each other, and then wound 

Their arms about him. What was calm or strife 
To him or them 1 What had they lost and found ? 

What thing was near 1 What things were gone afar 1 

With tears, and without words, they kissed the scar — 
His brother's hand against him all his life. 



THE LAST ANGEL. 51 



THE LAST ANGEL. 

A STORY TOLD OF CORREGGIO. 

The monks had shut his picture in, and, — yearning 
For one more last look, one, and yet one more, — 

Heavily laden, with the hollows burning 
In his dusk cheek, he left the convent door. 



Through the South sun he wandered homeward, 
moaning : 

" His Christ for silver gave the Jew of old ; 
Have I not sinned like him beyond atoning ? 

My Christ for copper I to-day have sold." 



Alone he walked, afraid to meet the faces 
He loved the most on earth — Ah, bitter fate ! 

His beautiful starving children, with hot traces 
Of tears on cheeks, were crowded at the gate. 



52 THE LAST ANGEL. 

But one, the youngest, spent with innocent weeping 
Touched by the weird moon with a tender beam, 

Among the shadows in the straw lay sleeping, 
Forgetting all, and laughing at her dream. 



Her father looked at her and lifted slowly 

His dying hand : " Give me my brush," he said. 

When his Last Angel, radiant and holy, 

Looked at him with his child's eyes, he was dead. 



DRAMATIC PERSONS AND MOODS. 



THE FANCY BALL. 

As Morning you 'd have me rise 

On that shining world of art ; 
You forget : I have too much dark in my eyes— 

And too much dark in my heart. 

" Then go as the Night — in June : 

Pass, dreamily, by the crowd, 
With jewels to mock the stars and moon, 

And shadowy robes like cloud. 

" Or as Spring, with a spray in your hair 

Of blossoms as yet unblown ; 
It will suit you well, for our youth should wear 

The bloom in the bud alone. 

" Or drift from the outer gloom 
With the soft white silence of Snow -." 

I should melt myself with the warm, close room- 
Or my own life's burning. No. 



56 TWELVE HOURS APART. 

" Then fly through the glitter and mirth 

As a Bird of Paradise : " 
Nay, the waters I drink have touched the earth ; 

I breathe no summer of spice. 

« Then " Hush : if I go at all, 

(It will make them stare and shrink, 

It will look so strange at a Fancy Ball) 
I will go as Myself, I think ! 



TWELVE HOUKS APART. 

He loved me. But he loved, likewise, 
This morning's world in bloom and wings ; 

Ah, does he love the world that lies 

In dampness, whispering shadowy things, 
Under this little band of moon ? 

He loves me '? Will he fail to see 
A phantom hand has touched my hair 

(And wavered, withering, over me) 
To leave a subtle greyness there. 
Below the outer shine of June 1 



TWELVE HOURS APART. 57 

He loves me ? Would he call it fair, 
The flushed half-flower he left me, say 1 

For it has passed beneath the glare 
And from my bosom drops away, 
Shaken into the grass with pain 'I 

He loves me 1 Well, I do not know. 

A song in plumage crossed the hill 
At sunrise when I felt him go — 

And song and plumage now are still. 
He could not praise the bird again. 

He loves me ? Veiled in mist I stand, 
My veins less high with life than when 

To-day's thin dew was in the land. 
Vaguely less beautiful than then — 
Myself a dimness with the dim. 

He loves me ? I am faint with fear. 

He never saw me quite so old ; 
I never met him quite so near 

My grave, nor quite so pale and cold 

Nor quite so sweet, he says, to him ! 



58 A LILY OF THE NILE. 



A LILY OF THE NILE. 

Who was the beautiful woman whose lover 

Once left her this dead old flower, did you 
say? 
Well, perhaps that is she in the picture over 

The vase with the flowers which you gathered 
to-day. 

The one with the deep strange dress, that is flowing 
All purple and pearls through each stiffened fold, 

And the band on her forehead, whose dusk-red 
glowing 
Shoots into great sharp thorns of gold. 



Never mind the light. You will see, to-morrov:, 
That, with eyes raised darkly and lips close- 
prest. 

She is giving away her awful sorrow 
To the snake she keeps at her breast ! 



A LILY OF THE NILE. 69 

" And who was her lover ^ " Why, that may be he, 
there, 

In the other picture glimmering nigh — 
Yes, the handsome and wretched man you see there, 

Falling against his sword to die. 

Will he die for her, do you say "? (Ah, will he X) 

No doubt he has often told her so ! 
"Did it bloom far away, this crumbling lily ?" 

Very far and so long ago. 

And who gave it to me ? 

So the withered story 

I 've dreamed by the twilight all this while, 
For some vanished blossom's day of glory, 

Is your truth, my Lily of the Nile. 

For the beautiful woman is slowly dying 
Of a snake as plain as this to my sight ; 

And her lover who gave her this flower is lying 
On the edge of a sword to-night. 



60 THERE WAS A ROSE. 



THERE WAS A ROSE. 

" There was a rose," she said, 

" Like other roses, perhaps, to you. 

Nine years ago it was faint and red, 
Away in the cold dark dew, 
On the dwarf bush where it grew. 



" Never any rose before 

Was like that rose, very well I know ; 

Never another rose any more 
Will blow as that rose did blow, 
When the wet wind shook it so. 



'' What do I want 1 — Ah, what ? 
Why, I want that rose, that wee one rose, 

Only that rose. And that rose is not 
Anywhere just now 1 . . . God knows 
Where all the old sweetness goes. 



THERE WAS A ROSE. 61 

" I want that rose so much ; 

I would take the world back there to the night 
Where I saw it blush in the grass, to touch 

It once in that Autumn light, 

And only once, if I might. 

" But a million marching men 

From the North and the South would arise, 
And the dead — would have to die again ? 

And the women's widowed cries 

Would trouble anew the skies ? 



" No matter. I would not care ; 

Were it not better that this should be 1 
The sorrow of many the many bear, — 

Mine is too heavy for me. 

And I want that rose, you see ! " 

Washington, D. C, 1870. 



IF I WERE A QUEEN. 



IF I WERE A QUEEN. 

" But if you were a Queen ? " you said. 

Well, then I think my favourite page 
Should have a yellow, restless head, 

And be just your own pretty age. 
So sweet in violet velvet, he 

Should tend my butterflies in herds, 
Or help that belted knight, the bee, 

Win honey, or make little birds 
Some little songs to sing for me — 

If I were a Queen. 

A Queen — you saw one sitting by 

A tall man in a picture ? Well. 
He had a harp ? You need not try — 

Her name is one you can not tell. 
And so you wonder if I could 

Be Isolt, then ? Not she, I fear, 
To save Sir Tristram of the Wood 

And all his tripping silver deer ; 
For it were better to be good. 

If I were a Queen. 



IF I WERE A QUEEN. 63 

Nor Guinevere You ask, would I 

Be Queen Elizabeth ? Oh ! no ; 
For, then, should I not have to die 

And leave, all hanging in a row. 
Two thousand dresses ? Could I bear 

To sit, majestic, cross, and grey. 
With red paint on my nose, or wear, 

Down in my grave till Judgment Day, 
The ring of Essex burning there, 

If I were a Queen 1 



Now let me ask myself awhile. 

Mary of Scotland, then 1 — since she 
Haunts her grey castle with a smile 

That one man may have died to see : 
She, fairest in Romance's light ; 

She, saddest-storied of them all ; 
She — but it would not please me quite 

To climb a scaffold, or to fall 
Beside my lovely head to-night. 

If I were a Queen. 

Then she of Egypt — with the asp 
To drain my deadly beauty dry 1 — 



64 IF I WERE A QUEEN. 

To see my Roman lover clasp 

His sword with surer love, and die 

Closer to it than me 'i Not so. 

No desert-snake with nursing grace 

Should draw my fierce heart's fiercest glow ; 
No coward of my conqueror's race 

Should off'er me his blood, I know — 
If I were a Queen. 

Boadic^a 1 I were afraid 

To see her scythed chariots shine ! 
Nor Vashti ; for she disobeyed 

Her lord, the king in kingly wine ! 
Then she, the Queen of the East, who found 

The Wisest not so well arrayed. 
In all his glory, as the ground 

Arrays its lilies 1 — Would I fade 
Into some shrunken Bible mound. 

If I were a Queen ? 

Semiramis 1 Were it not sweet 
To have a palace mirror show ^ 

How mad Assyria at my feet 
Might lie down like a lamb 1 And oh ! 

* Allusion to a celebrated painting of Semiramis . 



IF I WERE A QUEEN. 65 

To stand defiant, in the glare 

Of rising war, and softly say : 
'' My Beauty will subdue them ! " Rare 

And royal bloom must drop away ; 
Nor would I as a ghost look fair, 

If I were a Queen. 

Penelop6 1 No, on my word : 

Vexed grievously with suitors, while 
Much-wandering Ulysses heard 

Fine singing at the sirens' isle, 
Too small were Ithaca for me ! 

Then she whose gold hair glitters high 
With stars caught in its tangles ? ^ — See, 

How beautiful it is ! But I 
Should choose my hair on Earth to be, 
If I were a Queen ! 

Nor slight, blonde Marie Antoinette 1 
Nor she the Austrians called their King ? 

Nor any Blanche, or Margaret ? 

Nor Russia's Catharine ? Would I bring 

The Spanish woman's loth heart, then. 
From Aragon to England's throne ? 

^ Berenice's hair. 
E 



e6 IF I WERE A QUEEN. 

Or be the Italian, widowed, when 

She, in a garret at Cologne, 
Starved, a grey exile, shunned of men, 
If I were a Queen 1 

What Queen 1 Titania — since it seems 

A woman never quite can tire 
Of kissing long, fair ears ! In dreams 

My Gentle Joy I will admire. 
And — but there is no Fairyland 

Left in the crowded world, no room 
For dew, for anything but sand. 

Put out the moonshine, fold the bloom. 
My feet could find no space to stand, 
If I were a Queen. 

Ah ! still I ask myself, what Queen 1 

Well, one whose days were almost done, 
Who felt her grave-grass turning green, 

Who saw the low light of the sun 
Shrink from her palace windows, while 

Her whole court watched beside her bed. 
Ready to say, without a smile : 

" We loved the Queen. The Queen is dead." 
Then they should grieve a little while, 
If I were a Queen. 



IF I WERE A QUEEN. 67 

And my whole court, I think, should show 

Three little heads of lightest gold, 
Two others of a darker glow ; 

And One bent low enough to hold 
Between pale, quivering hands. And then 

Some Silence should receive my soul. 
My name should fade from lips of men,' 
My pleasant funeral-bells should toll' 
This hour, and dust be dust again— 

If T were a Queen. 



68 SOMETIME. 



SOMETIME. 

Well, either you or I, 

After whatever is to say is said, 
Must see the other die. 

Or hear, through distance, of the other dead. 

Sometime. 

And you or I must hide 

Poor empty eyes and faces, wan and wet 
With Life's great grief, beside 

The other's coffin, sealed with silence, yet, 

Sometime. 

And you or I must look 

Into the other's grave, or far or near, 
And read, as in a book. 

Writ in the dust, words we made bitter here, 

Sometime. 

Then, through what paths of dew. 

What flush of flowers, what glory in the grass, 
Only one of us two. 

Even as a shadow walking, blind may pass, 

Sometime ! 



SOMETIME. 69 

Andj if the nestling song 

Break from the bosom of the bird for love, 
No more to listen long 

One shall be deaf below, one deaf above, 

Sometime. 
For both must lose the way 

Wherein we walk together, very soon : 
One in the dusk shall stay, 

The other first shall see the rising moon, 

Sometime. 
Oh ! fast, fast friend of mine ! 

Lift up the voice I love so much, and warn ; — 
To wring faint hands and pine, 

Tell me I may be left forlorn, forlorn, 

Sometime. 
Say I may kiss through tears, 

For ever falling and for ever cold, 
One ribbon from sweet years. 

One dear dead leaf, one precious ring of gold, 

Sometime. 
Say you may think with pain 

Of some slight grace, some timid wish to please 
Some eager look half vain 

Into your heart, some broken sobs like these. 

Sometime ! 



70 THE ORDER FOR HER PORTRAIT. 



THE ORDER FOR HER PORTRAIT. 

I SAY what Cromwell said, 

(Smile, grey-haired sceptic, if you think me bold) 
And that Italian count whose hair was red, — 

His great will would not have it painted gold. 

No, I am brave, not vain ; 

Braver than he of Macedon, since I 
For Vanity's slight sake would hardly stain 

Art and the awful future with a lie : 

You know that hand whose pride 

Within its hollow held one world, afar 

Reaching for others, raised itself to hide 
On pictured brows the glory of a scar. 

But paint me as I am. 

Whatever shape or colour you may see ; 
And do not fold the white fleece of the lamb 

About the yellow lioness, for me. 

Ay, as I am. And then. 

No matter what you on your canvas find, 
It shall not shrink before the eyes of men ; 

It shall be truth — unless your soul be blind ! 



THE CLOTHES OF A GHOST. 71 



THE CLOTHES OF A GHOST. 

{The Spirit of a heautifid and vain Woman spealcs.'\ 

They were shut from me in a costly chest, 
Though I, in a woman's slight, sad way, 

Of the lovely things that I loved the best, 
Held none, I fear me, so sweet as they — 
For I was daintily dressed. 

A precious glimmer of gold was mine, 
To coil and charm on my bosom then ; 

And two great jewels whose restless shine 
Troubled the foolish hearts of men, 

Who fancied their light divine. 

These thin hands wore on their tremulous grace 
Such fair little gloves as soft as snows ; 

And softly laid on this dim, fixed face 

Were calm, clear colours of white and rose, 
In another time and place. 



72 THE CLOTHES OF A GHOST. 

There 's a withering, weird half-picture of me — 
No, of my clothes — on a shadowy wall : 

A wonderful painter, they said, was he, 
Who studied my drapery, that was all, 
Not guessing what I might be. 

Yet he followed me, in my far, flushed day. 
And thought he knew me, and held me dear ; 

And now, should I waver across his way. 

He would grow as ghastly as I am, with fear, 
Though he is so wise and grey ! 

But my beautiful clothes were his despair — 
They were so well-cut, so charmingly made. 

It is best that they were not worn threadbare ; 
It is best that I did not feel them fade ; 
It is best — did he ever care 1 

I, a thing too fearfully fine to show, 
Or stain the starlight wherein I pass. 

Must still have the old, fierce vanity groW; 
Must yearn by the water, as by a glass, 

For a glimpse of — nothing, I know ! 

Oh, my lovely clothes that I still admire ! 
They were only fashioned for moth and rust ; 



FLIGHT. 73 

Yet I, their wearer, though scarred by fire, 
Shall sit with the gentle ghosts, I trust, 

Who once wore meaner attire ! 

For, had I been less like the lilies arrayed — 
They of the field that toil not nor spin — 

I had thought of my Father's work, nor stayed 
In empty glory, in shining sin. 

Far into the final shade. 



FLIGHT. 

Through field and flood and fire I go,— 
Wherefore and where I do not know. 

Through field, — my tangled path is crossed 
With winds and stinging spears of frost. 

Through field, — the stones rise up and wound 
My fearful feet, that stain the ground. 

Through field, — sometimes one rose forlorn 
Gives me its flush, without its thorn. 



74 FLIGHT. 

Through flood, — the wide rains beat my brow 
The world is only water now. 

Through flood, — wave after wave there is : 
Wave after wave, — what else but this 1 

Through flood, — one sea another meets ; 
See Arctic ice in tropic heats ! 

Through flood, — there is one ship in sight : 
If I might reach it, — if I might ! 

Through fire, — what flames and flames there be ! 
The world is only fire to me. 

Through fire, — how palace spire and wall 
Put shining garments on and fall ! 

Through fire, — I hear the last voice cry, 
" The world is ashes." But am I ? 

Calm on the awful element, 

I turn and say, " I am content." 



MARBLE OR DUST *? 76 



MAEBLE OR DUST ? 

A CHILD, beside a statue, said to me, 
With pretty wisdom very sadly just, 

" That man is Mr. Lincoln, Mama. He 

Was made of marble ; we are made of dust." 

One flash of passionate sorrow trembled through 
The dust of which I had been dimly made, 

One fierce, quick wish to be of marble too — 
Not something meaner, that must fall and fade. 

*'To be for ever fair and still and cold," 

I faintly thought, with faint tears in my sight ; 

" To stand thus face to face with Time, and hold 
Between us that uncrumbling charm of white ; 

" To see the creatures formed of slighter stufi 
Waver in little dead-leaf whirls away. 

Yet know that I could wait and have enough 
Of frost and dew, enough of dark and day. 



76 MARBLE OR DUST ? 

. . . "I would be marble? Wherefore? Just to 
miss 

The tremors of glad pain that dust must know ? — 
The grief that settles after some dead kiss ? — 

The frown that was a smile not long ago ? 

''Do I forget the stone's long loneliness ? — 
The dumb impatience all wan watching brings ? — • 

The looking with blind eyes, in vague distress, 
For Christ's slow Coming and the End of Things ? 

"No, boy of mine, with your young yellow hair, 
Better the dust you scatter with your feet 

Than marble, which can see not you are fair — 
Than marble, which can feel not you are sweet. 

"Ay, or than marble which must meet the years 
Without my light relief of murmurous breath ; 

Without the bitter sweetness of my tears — 

Without the love which dust must have for Death." 



THEIR LOST PICTURE. 77 



THEIR LOST PICTURE. 

" No, it was nothing old and grand : 

Only a child, out in the sun, 
Choking a kitten with one hand, 

And crushing pretty flowers with one. 

" Some rosebuds, sweet as buds could be, 
Were blown against the blowing hair ; 

The clear eyes watched a cedar-tree, 
That held a red-bird flaming there. 

"The frame around was dark and small. 

Just opposite the open door. 
One morning, on our cottage wall 

It hung, when we were young and poor. 

"This little piece of light and bloom 
Was more, a thousand times, to me 

Than all you have seen in great church-gloom. 
Or palace-gallery light, could be. 

" You do not understand, I say. 

We saw the picture in the glass, 
In our first home so far away, 

When our dead child played in the grass " 



78 THE PALACE-BURNER. 

THE PALACE-BURNER. 

[PARIS, 1871.] 

A Picture in a Newspaper. 

She has been burning palaces. " To see 

The sparks look pretty in the wind 1" Well, yes — 

And something more. But women brave as she 
Leave much for cowards, such as I, to guess. 

But this is old, so old that everything 
Is ashes here — the woman and the rest. 

Two years are — oh ! so long. Now you may bring 
Some newer pictures. — You like this one best 1 

You wish that you had lived in Paris then 1 
You would have loved to burn a palace, too ? 

But they had guns in France, and Christian men 
Shot wicked little Communists like you. 

You would have burned the palace ? — Just because 
You did not live in it yourself ! Oh ! why 

Have I not taught you to respect the laws ? 

Fmi would have burned the palace — would not I? 



THE PALACE-BURNER. 79 

Would I? ... Go to your play. . . . Would I, 
indeed ? 

7.? Does the boy not know my soul to be 
Languid and worldly, with a dainty need 

For light and music ? Yet he questions me. 

Can he have seen my soul more near than I ? 

Ah ! in the dusk and distance sweet she seems, 
With lips to kiss away a baby's cry, 

Hands fit for flowers, and eyes for tears and 
dreams. 

Can he have seen my soul ? And could she wear 

Such utter life upon a dying face : 
Such unappealing, beautiful despair : 

Such garments — soon to be a shroud — with grace 1 

Would / burn palaces ? The child has seen 
In this fierce creature of the Commune here, 

So bright with bitterness and so serene, 
A being finer than my soul, I fear. 



80 A MASKED BALL. 



A MASKED BALL. 

There, in the music strangely met, 

From lands and ages wide apart, 
They came, like ghosts remembering yet 

The old sweet yearning of the heart. 

What sad and shining names were heard ! 

What stories swept the dust, like trains ! 
What minster-buried echoes stirred ! 

What backward splendours, backward stains ! 

Still two by two, as moved by fate, 

They came from silence and from song ; 

The tyranny of love or hate 

With that mock-pageant passed along. 

There kings and cardinals long gone 

Forgot their feuds, and joined the dance. 

His Holiness himself looked on. 

With something merry in his glance. 

There, priestly, yet not loth to please, 
Stood Abelard ; by some sad whim. 

In convent coif, poor H6loise 

Was near, confessing — what 1 — to him. 



A MASKED BALL. 81 

There, with forlornest beauty wan, 
Young Amy Eobsart walked unseen. 

While my Lord Leicester's looks were on 
Elizabeth, his gracious queen. 

There — though the blonde Eowena gazed, 
Gold-haired and stately, with surprise — 

Jewelled and dark, Rebecca raised 
The Saxon knight half-wistful eyes. 

And there, despite his inky cloak, 
The melancholy Dane seemed gay. 

And to Polonius' daughter spoke 

Things Shakespeare does not have him say. 

" I think," he said, " I know you by 
That most fantastic wreath you wear." 

She, with a little languid sigh. 

Asked— if his father's ghost were there. 

" That voice— though veiled, it can not hide. 

One trifling favour I would ask : 
Give me— Yourself." " No, no," she cried ; 

"You are — a stranger in a mask." 
p 



82 A DOUBT. 

What more ? Ah, well ! Ophelia fled 
From Hamlet — when his mask was raised. 

*' I — was — mistaken," Hamlet said, 
As in Ophelia's face he gazed. 



Ah, in the world, as at the ball. 
There is a mask that lovers wear ; 

We call it Youth. But let it fall, 
Then, — Hamlet and Ophelia stare. 



A DOUBT. 



It is subtle, and weary, and wide ; 
It measures the world at my side ; 

It touches the stars and the sun ; 
It creeps with the dew to my feet ; 

It broods on the blossoms, and none, 
Because of its brooding, are sweet; 
It slides as a snake in the grass, 
Whenever, wherever I pass. 



A DOUBT. 83 

It is blown to the South with the bird ; 

At the North, through the snow, it is heard; 

With the moon from the chasms of night 
It rises, forlorn and afraid ; 

If I turn to the left or the right 
I can not forget or evade ; 
When it shakes at my sleep as a dream, 
If I shudder, it stifles my scream. 

It smiles from the cradle ; it lies 
On the dust of the grave, and it cries 

In the winds and the wa,ters ; it slips 
In the flush of the leaf to the ground ; 

It troubles the kiss at my lips ; 
It lends to my laughter a sound ; 
It makes of the picture but paint; 
It unhaloes the brow of the saint. 

The ermine and crown of the king. 
The sword of the soldier, the ring 

Of the bride, and the robe of the priest, 
The gods in their prisons of stone, 

The angels that sang in the East- 
Yea, the cross of my Lord, it has known ; 
And wings there are none that can fly 
From its shadow with me, till I die ! 



84 A woman's birthday. 



A WOMAN'S BIRTHDAY. 

[In August.] 

It is the Summer's great last heat, 

It is the Fall's first chill : they meet. 

Dust in the grass, dust in the air, 

Dust in the grave — and everywhere ! 

Ah, late rose, eaten to the heart : 

Ah, bird, whose southward yearnings start : 

The one may fall, the other fly. 

Why may not I ? Why may not I ? 

Oh, Life ! that gave me for my dower 
The hushing song, the worm-gnawed flower, 
Let drop the rose from your shrunk breast 
And blow the bird to some warm nest ; 
Flush out your dying colours fast : 
The last dead leaf — will be the last. 
No ? Must I wear your piteous smile 
A little while, a little while ? 



A woman's birthday. 85 

The withering world accepts her fate 
Of mist and moaning, soon or late ; 
She had the dew, the scent, the spring 
And upward rapture of the wing ; 
Their time is gone, and with it they. 
And am I wooing Youth to stay- 
in these dry days, that still would be 
Not fair to me, not fair to me ? 



If Time has stained with gold the haii-, 
Should he not gather greyness there ? 
Whatever gifts he chose to make, 
If he has given, shall he not take 1 
His hollow hand has room for all 
The beauty of the world to fall 
Therein. I give my little part 
With aching heart, with aching heart. 



86 COMFORT — BY A COFFIN. 



COMFOKT— BY A COFFIN. 

Ah, friend of mine, 
The old enchanted story ! — Oh, 

I cannot hear a word ! 
Tell some poor child who loved a bird. 
And knows he holds it stained and still,, 

" It flies — in Fairyland ! 
Its nest is in a palm-tree, on a hill ; 

Go, catch it — if you will ! " 

Ah, friend of mine. 
The music (which ear hath not heard?) 

At best wails from the skies. 
Somehow, into our funeral cries ! 
The flowers (eye hath not seen 1) still fail 

To hide the coffin lid ; 
Against this face, so pitiless now and pale^ 

Can the high heavens avail ? 

Ah, friend of mine, 
I think you mean — to mean it all 1 

But then an angel's wing 
Is a remote and subtle thing, 



COMFORT — BY A COFFIN. 87 

(If you could show me any such 

In air that I can breathe !) 
And surely Death's cold hand has much, so much. 

About it we can touch ! 



Ah, friend of mine, 
Say nothing of the thorns— and then 

Say nothing of the snow. 
God's will 1 It is— that thorns must grow, 
Despite our bare and troubled feet. 

To crown Christ on the cross : 
The snow keeps white watch on the unrisen wheat; 

And yet — the world is sweet. 



Ah, friend of mine, 
I know, I know — all you can know ! 

All you can say is — this : 
" It is the last time you can kiss 
This only one of all the dead, 

Knowing it is the last ; 
These are the last tears you can ever shed 

On this fair fallen head." 



88 WE TWO. 



WE TWO. 

God's will is — the bud of the rose for your hair, 
The ring for your hand and the pearl for your 
breast ; 

God's will is — the mirror that makes you look fair. 
No wonder you whisper : " God's will is the best." 

But what if God's will were the famine, the flood 1 — 
And were God's will the coffin shut down in your 
face ?— 

And were God's will the worm in the fold of the bud, 
Instead of the picture, the light, and the lace 1 

Were God's will the arrow that flieth by night, 
Were God's will the pestilence walking by day, 

The clod in the valley, the rock on the height — 
I fancy "God's will " would be harder to say. 

God's will is — your own will. What honour have you 
For having your own will, awake or asleep 1 

Who praises the lily for keeping the dew, 

When the dcAV is so sweet for the lily to keep ? 



ENCHANTED. 89 

God's will unto me is not music or wine. 

With helpless reproaching, with desolate tears, 
God's will I resist, for God's will is divine ; 

And I — shall be dust to the end of my years. 

God's will is — not mine. Yet one night I shall lie 
Very still at his feet, where the stars may not shine. 

" Lo ! I am well pleased," I shall hear from the sky; 
Because — it is God's will I do, and not mine. 



ENCHANTED. 

She sat in a piteous hut. 

In a wood where poisons grew. 

Withered was every leaf, 

And her face was withered too. 

Like a sword the sharp wind cut 

Her worn heart through and through. 

Away, and so far away. 

She looked for a light and a sign : 
" Oh, he has not forgotten me ! 

What should I care for to-day, 
When all to-morrow is mine ? 

I am content to stay." 



90 ENCHANTED. 

On the heights the hail would beat, 
In the thorns would sink the snow, 

And the chasms were weird with sound 
Yet the years would come and go : 

" Somewhere there is something sweet, 
And some time I shall know. 

" There is a land close by, 
A land in reach of my arm ; 

It is mine from shore to sea ; — 
There the nightingales do fly. 

There the flush of the rose is warm : 
I shall take it by and by. 

" But the shape that guards the gate, 
Where my mirror waits to show 

How beautiful I am, 

Oh, he makes me loth to go. 

I wait, and I wait, and I wait, — 
Through fear of him, I know. 

" But who breaks this charm of breath 
Enchantment himself must wear. 

Two from each other shrink 

In the freezing dark, and stare : . . . 

Your kiss for my kiss, Death ! 
Each makes the other fair." 



THE ALTAR AT ATHENS. 91 

THE ALTAR AT ATHENS. 

["TO THE UNKNOWN GOD."] 

Because my life was hollow with a pain 

As old as — death : because my eyes were dry 

As the fierce tropics after months of rain : 

Because my restless voice said "Whyf and 
"Why?" 

Wounded and worn, I knelt within the night, 

As blind as darkness — Praying ? And to Whom 1 — 

When yon cold crescent cut my folded sight, 
And showed a phantom Altar in my room. 

It was the Altar Paul at Athens saw. 

The Greek bowed there, but not the Greek alone ; 
The ghosts of nations gathered, wan with awe. 

And laid their offerings on that shadowy stone. 

The Egyptian worshipped there the crocodile, 
There they of Nineveh the bull with wings ; 

The Persian there, with swart sun-lifted smile, 
Felt in his soul the writhing fire's bright stings. 



92 HER CROSS AND MINE. 

There the weird Druid held his mistletoe ; 

There for the scorched son of the sand, coiled 
bright, 
The torrid snake was hissing sharp and low ; 

And there the Atlantic savage paid his rite. 

"Allah ! " the Moslem darkly muttered there ; 

" Brahma ! " the jewelled Indies of the East 
Sighed through their spices, with a languid prayer ; 

" Christ 1 " faintly questioned many a paler priest. 

And still the Athenian Altar's glimmering Doubt 

On all religions — evermore the same. 
What tears shall wash its sad inscription out % 

What Hand shall write thereon His other name ? 



HER CROSS AND MINE. 

" This is my cross — here. Sister, see : 
The only one I have to bear." 

A flash of gold fell over me, 

And precious lights were everywhere. 



HER CROSS AND MINE. 93 

She was a lovely, restless thing, 

With time in blossom at her feet, 
And on her hand the enchanted ring 

Whose promise always is so sweet. 

I was a nun. My fearless eyes 

Had looked their last on youth. I guessed 
At something quiet in the skies. 

And veiled my face against the rest. 

My cross was dark and darkly stained, 
Even from the heart of one who died . — 

Invisible drops of blood had rained 
Thereon, when love was crucified. 

That laughing girl could pity me, 
Because she fancied from my cross 

The world had fallen. Such as she 
Still think to lose the world — is loss ! 

Yet, heavier is her cross than mine. 

For in the fatal jewels there 
(Oh, will she ask for help divine ?) 

I know she has the world to bear. 



94 TWO IN TWO WORLDS. 



TWO IN TWO WORLDS. 

A PEASANT girl sat in the grass, 
With just a peasant's eyes to see 

The king's fair son when he should pass ; — 
From farthest Fairyland was he. 

" He cannot love me — but he might, 
If this or that had chanced to be. 

It breaks my heart to know how slight 
The things that hold him high from me. 

" Had I been born in yonder tower, 
With just a jewel for my hair, — 

Not half so sweet as this one flower, — 
He would have climbed to reach me there. 

" Just for some fairness in my face ; 

Some ermine on a train of state ; 
Some poor, dead name that he could trace 

To royal tombs — I were his mate ! 



TWO IN TWO WORLDS. 95 

" So brief the distance then between 
Palace and hut, need I be sad 1 — 

Almost he loves me. Ay, a queen 
I were — if but a crown I had ! 

** Ah me, unhappy in my place ! 

What matter, since they are apart, 
Whether one rose-leaf or all space 

Divide divided heart and heart 1 " 



... It was a thousand years ago. 

To-night Time tells the tale anew : 
I am that peasant girl, I know ; 

And, sir, the king's fair son are you ! 



96 CAPRICE AT HOME. 



CAPEICE AT HOME. 

No, I will not say good-bye — 
Not good-bye, nor anything. 

He is gone. ... I wonder why 
Lilacs are not sweet this spring. 
How that tiresome bird will sine ! 



I might follow him and say 

Just that he forgot to kiss 
Baby, when he went away. 

Everything I want I miss. 

Oh, a precious world is this ! 

. . . What if night came and not he ? 

Something might mislead his feet. 
Does the moon rise late 1 Ah me ! 

There are things that he might meet. 

Now the rain begins to beat : 



CAPRICE AT HOME. 97 

So it will be dark. The bell ?— 
Some one some one loves is dead. 

Were it he ! I cannot tell 

Half the fretful words I said, 
Half the fretful tears I shed. 

Dead 1 And but to think of death !— 
Men might bring him through the gate : 

Lips that have not any breath, 

Eyes that stare And I must wait ! 

Is it time, or is it late ? 

I was wrong, and wrong, and wrong ; 

I will tell him, oh, be sure ! 
If the heavens are builded strong, 

Love shall therein be secure ; 

Love like mine shall there endure. 

. . . Listen, listen — that is he ! 

I '11 not speak to him, I say. 
If he choose to say to me, 

" I was all to blame to-day ; 

Sweet, forgive me," why — I may! 



98 A WALL BETWEEN. 



A WALL BETWEEN. 

[A piteous thing, you know, 
Half hinted, at the edge of the earth, my friend: 

Clinging to its last clod, She whispers low, 
Not knoioing He has listened till the end. 

A woman's tale {of wrong and grief), 

And, therefore, none too brief. 

He who could leave her heart, 
Spite of youth'' s passionate promises, to break 

( While through their children's home he walked, apart. 
Dumb as the dead), must, for her souVs sweet sake. 

Come, at the last, in priest-disguise 

To help her to the skies /] 

Then, do I doubt 1 Not so. 
Though the stars wander without any Guide 

Out there in loneliest dark, almost I know — 
I do believe that He was crucified. 

Arisen and ascended to 

The Heaven 1 Oh, priest, I do. 

Still, you were kind to come. 
Only to tell me, then, that I must die ? 

I knew as much. Ah me, the mouth was dumb 



A WALL BETWEEN. 99 

That told me first (let bygone things go by), — 
The young sad mouth, without a breath. 
Yes, I believe in death. 

(A crucifix to kiss ?) 
Another world may light your lifted eyes, 

But, by my heart that breaks, I am of this. 
Are you quite sure those palms of Paradise 

Do shelter for me one sweet head 1 

Or, are the dead — the dead 1 

It is a vain world 1 Oh, 
It is a goodly world, — a world wherein 

We hear the doves (that moan?) — the winds 
(that blow 
The buds away 1) It is a world of sin. 

And therefore sorrow 1 — Was it, then, 

Fashioned and formed of men 1 

Pray, would you give one rood 
Of your dark, certain soil, where olives grow. 

For all those shining heights on heights, where 
brood 
The wings you babble of that shame the snow ? 

Why, what new song 1 But I have heard 

In our own trees a bird. 



100 A WALL BETWEEN. 

(Oh, call it what you will !) 
Light, hollow, brief, and bitter *? Yes, I know. 

With cruel seas and sands'? Yes, yes, and 

still 

And fire and famine following where we go 1 

And still I leave it at my feet, 

Moaning, "The world is sweet." 

Why, it was here that I 
Had youth and all that only youth can bring. 

Fair sir, if you would help a woman die, 
Show me a glass. There ! that one look will wring 

My heart, I think, out of its place ; — 

The earth may take my face. 

Think of the blessed skies '? 
If in the cheek one have no rose to wear, 

If nights all full of tears have changed the eyes, — 
Why, would one be immortal and not fair 1 

With faded hair, one would not quite 

Contrast an aureole's light. 

You talk of things unseen 
With all the pretty arrogance of a boy. 

Why, one could laugh at what you think you 
mean. 



A WALL BETWEEN, 101 

You see the bud upon the bough with joy, 

You look through summer toward the fruit 

The worm is at the root ? 

Well — if it is. You see, 
Your feet are set among our pleasant deAvs ; 

Therefore, that crown of phantom stars for me, 
In distance most divine, you kindly choose, 

Content to leave your own unwon, 

And shine here with the sun. 

Hush ! Wait ! Somehow — I know. 
You do remind me tenderly of — yes, 

Of him, your kinsman (long, so long ago). 
But for these sacred garments. I confess, 

Oh, father, I cannot forget 

The world where he stays yet ! 

Quick ! will you look away ? 
Too cruelly like him in the dusk you grow, — 

This awful dusk that ends it all, I say. 
You pity us when we are young, you know, 

And lose a lover. Surely then 

There may be other men. 



102 A WALL BETWEEN. 

But when the hand we bind 
So that it cannot reach out anywhere, 

Then find, or, sadder, fancy that we find, 
The ring is not true gold, you do not care ; — 

These tragedies writ in wedding rings 

Are common, tiresome things. 

On earth there was one man, — 
There were no men. They all had faded through 

His shadow. Surely, where our grief began, 
In that old garden, he, that one of two, 

Looked not to Eve, before the Fall, 

So much the lord of all. 



And yet he said 1 crave 

Your patience. I will not forget to die. 

And there is no remembrance in the grave ; 
That comforts one. Better it is to lie 

Not knowing thistles grow above, 

Than to remember love. 

. . . Now you may call my friends, — 
Ah, my sweet friends. They whispered just a word 
Or two last night here by me. To what ends 



A WALL BETWEEN. 103 

They look through tears ! I thank them that I heard. 
"A charming chance," one lightly said ; 
The other's cheek burned red. 



The blush I could not see 
I felt, like fire. Then they both laughed, — and this 

Beside the dying. He, they said, would be 
Handsome and lonely. Lonely 1 Will he miss 

The flower they bury in my breast. 

Up here with all the rest 1 

Yes, we have many a year, 
And then we have one hour — and he away ! 

Why, there was something only he should hear. 
... He wore his cloak 1 — it is so cold for May. 

If he would come (the lamp looks dim), 

I 'd leave the world — to him. 



Then tell him, priest, if he 

Tell him, I pray you, this — ah, yet he said 

Then only tell him — nothing sweet for me. 
Tell him I have not tasted once his bread 

Since then. Tell him I die too proud 

To take of him a shroud. 



104 A WALL BETWEEN. 

I, with the raven's trust 
For food, the lily's trust for raiment, found 

Who feeds the one and clothes the other must 
Remember me. My hands, through many a wound, 

That which they had were glad to earn. 

He gave — what I '11 return. 

Ask him if I forgot 
One household care. If I, in such poor ways 

As I could know, through piteous things have not 
Tried still to please him, lo, these many days ; — 

Ah, bitter task, self -set and vain ! 

1 hear the wind and rain. 



I fear he will be wet, 
And — not afraid — but, somehow, something might 

Trouble him in the dark. You know he met 
Strange men, somewhere, he said, one lonesome night. 

If anything should hurt him, I — 

Yes, I forgot — could die. 

I have not seen his face 
Since then. We lived a wall apart, we two, 

While dark and void between us was all space. 



A WALL BETWEEN. 105 

Sometimes I hid, and watched his shadow through 
Too wistful eyes, as it would pass, 
Ghost-like, from off the grass. 

Tell him, beneath his roof 
I felt I had not where to lay my head, 

Yet could not dare the saintly world's reproof. 
And withered under my own scorn instead ; 

Still whispering, " For the children's sake," 

I let my slow heart break. 

The children 1 Let them sleep— 
To waken motherless. Could I put by 

Their arms, and lie like snow, and have them weep. 
With my own eyes so empty and so dry ? 

I 've left some pretty things, you see, 

To comfort them for me, — 

Sweet dresses, curious toys 

But, after all, what will the baby do 1 

. . . Hush ! Here he is, waked by the wind's 
wild noise. 
Let mother count the dimples, one and two. 

Whose baby has the goldenest head 1 

I dreamed once he was dead. 



106 A WALL BETWEEN. 

Dead, and for many a year ? — 
Can a dead baby laugh and babble so 1 

Do you not see me kiss and kiss him here, 
And hold death from me still to kiss him 1 —No ? 

Yet I did dream white blossoms grew 

Do cruel dreams come true ? 



... As the tree falls, one says, 
So shall it lie. It falls, remembering 

The sun and stillness of its leaf-green days. 
The moons it held, the nested bird's warm wing, 

The promise of the buds it wore, 

The fruit — it never bore. 

So, take my cross, and go. 
Where my Lord Christ descended I descend. 

Shall I ascend like Him 1 — I do not know. 
I loved the world ; the world is at an end. 

Therefore, I pray you, shut your book, 

And take away that look. 

That look — of his ! You stay. 
Then, say I loved him bitterly to the last ! 

Who loves one sweetly loves not much, I say. 



A WALL BETWEEN. 107 

Love's blush by moonlight will fade out full fast. 
Love's lightning scar at least we keep. 
Now, let me — go to sleep. 

. . . His voice, too, in disguise ! 
It is — in pity, no ! Yes, it is he ! — 

With tears of memory in his steadfast eyes. 
Mock-priest, how sharply you have shriven me ! 

Your cousin's righteous robes 1 fear 

You had somewhat to hear. 

Ah ? Had you said but this 

A year ago. Now, let my chill hand fall ; 

It gives you back your youth. — But you will miss 
My shadow from your sunshine. That is all 

Yet — if some lovelier life shall dawn 

And I should love you on 1 

Good-bye. Was it well done ? 
You know that Eastern tale, where gifts of gold 

And glory — as a king's comfort — came to one 
Who, having starved, went out with courtesy cold 

To meet and waive that bitter state, 

Dumbly, through his own gate. 



108 A LESSON IN A PICTURE. 



A LESSON IN A PICTURE. 

So it is whispered here and there, 
That you are rather pretty ? Well 1 

(Here 's matter for a bird of the air 
To drop down from the dusk and tell.) 

Let 's have no lights, my child. Somehow, 

The shadow suits your blushes now. 

The blonde young man who called to-day 
(He only rang to leave a book ? — 

Yes, and a flower or two, I say !) 

Was handsome, look you. Will you look 1 

You did not know his eyes were fine 1 

You did not ! Can you look in mine ? 

What is it in this picture here. 

That you should suddenly watch it so 1 

A maiden leaning half in fear, 

From her far casement ; and, below, 

In cap and plumes (or cap and bells ?) 

Some fairy tale her lover tells. 



A LESSON IN A PICTURE. 109 

Suppose this lonesome night could be 

Some night a thousand springs ago, 
Dim round that tower ; and you were she, 

And your shy friend her lover (Oh !), 
And I — her mother ! And suppose 
I knew just why she wore that rose- 
Do you think I 'd kiss my girl, and say : 

" Make haste to bid the wedding guest, 
And make the wedding garment gay, — 

You could not find in East or West 
So brave a bridegroom ; I rejoice 
That you have made so sweet a choice " 1 

Or say, " To look for ever fair, 

Just keep this turret moonlight wound 

About your face ; stay in mid-air ; — 
Eope-ladders lead one to the ground. 

Where all things take the touch of tears. 

And nothing lasts a thousand years " ? 



110 FROM TWO WINDOWS. 



FEOM TWO WINDOWS. 

He was yoTing — and he saw the South 

The bird and the rose were there, 
And the god with the lifted look 

And the laurel in his hair. 
Before him a palace stood ; — 

A shy wind moved the lace, 
And showed by the light of a dream 

A woman's wonderful face. 

He was old — and he saw the North : 

The mountains were fierce and bare. 
And pitiless swords of ice 

Were thrust at him from the air. 
A ruin blackened the moon ; 

And in that forlomest place, 
Wasted with famine and tears, 

Lo, a woman's dreadful face ! 



DENIED. Ill 



DENIED. 
I. 

[the lady's thought.] 

It may have been Who knows, who knows 

It was too dark for me to see. 
The wind that spared this very rose 

Its few last leaves could hardly be 
Sadder of voice than he. 

A foreign Prince here in disguise, 
Who asked a shelter from the rain : 

(The country that he came from lies 
Above the clouds.) He asked in vain 
And will not come again. 

If I had known that it was He 

Who had not where to lay His head : — 

"But my Lord Christ, it cannot be ; 
My guest-room has too white a bed 
For wayside dust," I had said. 



112 DENIED. 



II. 

[the mother's thought.] 

It was my own sweet child — the one 

Whose baby mouth breathes at my breast. 

(A fairer and a brighter none, 
Save His own Mother, ever prest 
Into diviner rest.) 

He had escaped my arms and strayed 
Into the pitiless world that night. 

With wounded feet and faith betrayed, 
Charmed backward by a glimmer of light, 
Almost he stood in sight. 

Oh, I had let him ask in vain, 

(Vague, lonesome, shadowy years ahead,) 
My roof to hide him from the rain, 

My lamp to comfort him, my bread. 
Who came as from the dead ! 



AFTER THE QUARREL. 113 



AFTER THE QUARREL. 

Hush, my pretty one. Not yet. 

Wait a little, only wait. 
Other blue flowers are as wet 

As your eyes, outside the gate 
He has shut for ever. — But 
Is the gate for ever shut ? 

Just a young man in the rain 

Saying (the last time?) "good-night!' 
Should he never come again 

Would the world be ended quite ? 

Where would all these rosebuds go ? 

All these robins 1 Do you know % 

But — he will not come ? Why, then, 

Is no other within call ? 
There are men, and men, and men — 

And these men are brothers all ! 
Each sweet fault of his you '11 find 
Just as sweet in all his kind. 

H 



114 AFTER THE QUARREL. 

None with eyes like his 1 Oh — oh ! 

In diviner ones did I 
Look, perhaps, an hour ago. 

Whose 1 Indeed (you must not cry) 
Those I thought of — are not free 
To laugh down your tears, you see. 

Voice like his was never heard ? 

No — but better ones, I vow ; 
Did you ever hear a bird 1 — 

Listen, one is singing now ! 
And his gloves 1 His gloves ? Ah, well, 
There are gloves like his to sell. 

At the play to-night you '11 see, 
In mock-velvet cloaks, mock earls 

With mock-jewelled swords, that he 
Were a clown by ! — Now, those curls 

Are the barber's pride, I say ; 

Do not cry for them, I pray. 

If no one should love you 1 Why, 
You can love some other still : 

Philip Sidney, Shakespeare, ay. 
Good King Arthur, if you will; 

Eaphael — he was handsome too. 

Love them one and all. I do. 



THE DESCENT OF THE ANGEL. 115 



THE DESCENT OF THE ANGEL. 

*' This is the house. Come, take the keys, 
Romance and Travel here must end." 

Out of the clouds, not quite at ease, 
I saw the pretty bride descend ; — 

With satin sandals, fit alone 

To glide in air, she touched the stone. 

A thing to fade through wedding lace, 
From silk and scents, with priest and ring, 

Floated across that earthly place 

Where life must be an earthly thing. 

An earthly voice was in her ears, 

Her eyes awoke to earthly tears. 



116 DOUBLE QUATRAINS. 



DOUBLE QUATRAINS. 
I. 

" WE WOMEN." 

,Heart-ACHE and heart-break — always that or this. 

Sometimes it rains just when the sun should shine ; 
Sometimes a glove or ribbon goes amiss ; 

Sometimes, in youth, your lover should be mine. 

Still madam frets at life, through pearls and lace 
(A breath can break her pale heart's measured 
beat). 

And still demands the maid who paints her face 
Shall find the world for ever smooth and sweet. 

II. 

WORD OF COUNSEL. 

Others will kiss you while your mouth is red. 

Beauty is brief. Of all the guests who come 
While the lamp shines on flowers, and wine, and 
bread, 

In time of famine who will spare a crumb 1 



DOUBLE QUATRAINS. 117 

Therefore, oh, next to God, I pray you keep 
Yourself as your own friend, the tried, the true. 

Sit your own watch — others will surely sleep. 

Weep your own tears. Ask none to die with you. 

III. 

BROKEN PROMISE. 

After strange stars, inscrutable, on high j 
After strange seas beneath his floating feet ; 

After the glare in many a brooding eye, — 
I wonder if the cry of " Land " was sweet 1 

Or did the Atlantic gold, the Atlantic palm. 

The Atlantic bird and flower, seem poor, at best. 

To the grey Admiral under sun and calm, 
After the passionate doubt and faith of quest ? 

IV. 

UTTER DARKNESS. 

If I should have void darkness in my eyes 
While there were violets in the sun to see ; 

If I should fail to hear my child's sweet cries, 
Or any bird's voice in our threshold tree ; 



118 DOUBLE QUATRAINS. 

If I should cease to answer love or wit : 

Blind, deaf, or dumb, how bitter each must be ! 

Blind, deaf, or dumb — I will not think of it ! 
. . . Yet the night comes when I shall be all three. 



THE HAPPIER GIFT. 

DiViNEST words that ever singer said 
Would hardly lend your mouth a sweeter red ; 
Her aureole, even hers whose book you hold, 
Could give your head no goldener charm of gold. 

Ah me ! you have the only gift on earth 
That to a woman can be surely worth 
Breathing the breath of life for. Keep yonr place 
Even she had given her fame to have your face. 

VI. 

IN DOUBT. 

Through dream and dusk a frightened whisper said 
" Lay down the world : the one you love is dead." 
In the near waters, without any cry 
I sank, therefore — glad, oh so glad, to die ! 



DOUBLE QUATRAINS. 119 

Far on the shore, with sun, and dove, and dew, 

And apple-flowers, I suddenly saw you. 
Then — was it kind or cruel that the sea 
Held back my hands, and kissed and clung to me ? 



VII. 

A LOOK INTO THE GRAVE. 

I LOOK, through tears, into the dust to find 
What manner of rest man's only rest may be. 

The darkness rises up and smites me blind. 
The darkness — is there nothing more to see ? 

Oh, after flood, and fire, and famine, and 
The hollow watches we are made to keep 

In our forced marches over sea and land— 
I wish we had a sweeter place to sleep. 

VIIL 
ETIQUETTE. 

In some old Spanish court there chanced to be 
No one whose office was to save the kins: 

From death by fire. The king himself 1 Not he ;— 
Could royal hands have done so mean a thing 1 



120 DOUBLE QUATRAINS. 

My boy, through life think how this king of Spain 
(Whose name none knows — and so you'll not 
forget !) 

Caught by his palace hearth-flames, not in vain 
To ashes burned — for sake of Etiquette ! 



IX. 
SEPTEMBER. 

Send back these lonesome lights to Fairyland, ^ 
Whose wing6d glimmer of gold lured childish 
feet, 
Borrowed (with bud and bird), you understand, 
To keep while moons were warm and dews were 
sweet. 

Hush, — we may have them for a little yet 

Before the weird leaf-gathering frost creeps on. 

Ah, loveliest time ! — wherein we may regret 
The fair things going, not the sweet things gone. 

1 Fireflies. 



DOUBLE QUATRAINS. 121 

X. 

FOR another's sake. 

Sweet, sweet ? My child, some sweeter word than 
sweet. 

Some lovelier word than love, I want for you. 
Who says the world is bitter, while your feet 

Are left among the lilies and the dew 1 

. . . Ah 1 So some other has, this night, to fold 
Such hands as his, and drop some precious head 

From off her breast as full of baby-gold ? 
I, for her grief, will not be comforted. 



IN COMPANY WITH CHILDREN 



AFTER WINGS. 

This was your butterfly, you see. 

His fine wings made him vain 1 — 
The caterpillars crawl, but he 

Passed them in rich disdain ? — 
My pretty boy says, " Let him be 

Only a worm again ? " 



Oh child, when things have learned to wear 
Wings once, they must be fain 

To keep them always high and fair. 
Think of the creeping pain 

Which even a butterfly must bear 
To be a worm again ! 



126 BABY OR BIRD? 



BABY OR BIRD 1 

" But is he a Baby or a Bird ?" 
Sometimes I fancy I do not know ; 

His voice is as sweet as I ever heard 
Far up where the light leaves blow. 

Then his lovely eyes, I think, would see 
As clear as a Bird's in the upper air ; 

And his red-brown head, it seems to me. 
Would do for a Bird to bear. 

*' If he were a Bird," you wisely say, 

" He would have some wings to know him by :' 
Ah, he has wings, that are flying away 

For ever — how fast they fly ! 

They are flying with him, by day, by night ; 

Under suns and stars, over storm and snow, 
These fair, fine wings, that elude the sight, 

In softest silence they go. 

Come, kiss him as often as you may — 
Hush, never talk of this time next year, 

For the same small Bird that we pet to-day, 
To-morrow is never here ! 



MY BABES IN THE WOOD. 127 



MY BABES IN THE WOOD. 

I KNOW a story, fairer, dimmer, sadder, 
Than any story painted in your books. 

You are so glad 1 It will not make you gladder ; 
Yet listen, with your pretty restless looks. 

" Is it a Fairy Story ?" Well, half fairy— 
At least it dates far back as fairies do. 

And seems to me as beautiful and airy ; 
Yet half, perhaps the fairy half, is true. 

You had a baby sister and a brother, 
(Two very dainty people, rosily white, 

Each sweeter than all things except the other !) 
Older yet younger — gone from human sight ! 

And I, who loved them, and shall love them ever. 
And think with yearning tears how each light hand 

Crept toward bright bloom or berries — I shall never 
Know how I lost them. Do you understand ? 



128 INIY BABES IN THE WOOD. 

Poor slightly golden heads ! I think I missed them 
First, in some dreamy, piteous, doubtful way ; 

But when and where with lingering lips I kissed them, 
My gradual parting, I can never say. 

Sometimes I fancy that they may have perished 
In shadowy quiet of wet rocks and moss, 

Near paths whose very pebbles I have cherished, 
For their small sakes, since my most lovely loss. 

I fancy, too, that they were softly covered 
By robins, out of apple-flowers they knew, 

Whose nursing wings in far home sunshine hovered, 
Before the timid world had dropped the dew. 

Their names were — what yours are! At this you 
wonder. 

Their pictures are — your own, as you have seen ; 
And my bird-buried darlings, hidden under 

Lost leaves — why, it is your dead selves I mean ! 



MY GHOST. 129 

MY GHOST. 

[a story told to my little cousin KATE.] 

Yes, Katie, I think you are very sweet, 

Now that the tangles are out of your hair, 
And you sing as well as the birds you meet. 

That are playing, like you, in the blossoms there. 
But now you are coming to kiss me, you say : 

Well, what is it for 1 Shall I tie your shoe, 
Or loop your sleeve in a prettier way ? 

Do I know about ghosts ? Indeed I do. 

Have I seen one 1 Yes : last evening, you know, 

We were taking a walk that you had to miss, 
(I think you were naughty and cried to go, 

But, surely, you '11 stay at home after this !) 
And, away in the twihght lonesomely 

(" What is the twilight ? " It 's— getting late !) 
I was thinking of things that were sad to me — 

There, hush ! you know nothing about them, Kate 

Well, we had to go through the rocky lane, 
Close to that bridge where the water roars 
I 



130 MY GHOST. 

By a still, red house, where the dark and rain 
Go in when they will at the open doors ; 

And the moon, that had just waked up, looked 
through 
The broken old windows and seemed afraid, 

And the wild bats flew and the thistles grew 
Where once in the roses the children played. 

Just across the road by the cherry-trees 

Some fallen white stones had been lying so long. 
Half hid in the grass, and under these 

There were people dead. I could hear the song 
Of a very sleepy dove, as I passed 

The graveyard near, and the cricket that cried ; 
And I looked (ah ! the Ghost is coming at last !) 

And something was walking at my side. 

It seemed to be wrapped in a great dark shawl, 

(For the night was a little cold, you know). 
It would not speak. It was black and tall ; 

And it walked so proudly and very slow. 
Then it mocked me — everything I could do : 

Now it caught at the lightning-flies like me ; 
Now it stopped where the elder-blossoms grew ; 

Now it tore the thorns from a grey bent tree. 



THE END OF THE RAINBOW. 131 



Still it followed me under the yellow moon, 
Looking back to the graveyard now and then, 

Where the winds were playing the night a tune- 
But, Kate, a Ghost does n't care for men. 

And your papa could n't have done it harm ! 



. . . Ah, dark-eyed darling, what is it you see ' 
There, you need n't hide in your dimpled arm — 
It was only my Shadow that walked with me ! 



THE END OF THE RAINBOW. 

May you go to find it 1 You must, I fear ; 

Ah, lighted young eyes, could I show you how 

'' Is it past those lilies that look so near ? " 

It is past all flowers. Will you listen, now ? 

The pretty new moons faded out of the sky, 
The bees and butterflies out of the air. 

And sweet wild songs would flutter and fly 

Into wet dark leaves and the snow's white glare. 

There were winds and shells full of lonesome cries, 
There were lightnings and mists along the way, 

And the deserts would glitter against my eyes, 
Where the beautiful phantom-fountains play. 



132 THE HIGHEST MOUNTAIN. 

At last, in a place very dusty and bare, 
Some little dead birds I had petted to sing, 

Some little dead flowers I had gathered to wear, 
Some withered thorns and an empty ring, 

Lay scattered. My fairy story is told. 

(It does not please her : she has not smiled.) 
What is it you say ?— Did I find the gold ? 

Why, I found the End of the Rainbow, child ! 



THE HIGHEST MOUNTAIN. 

I KNOW of a higher Mountain. Well ? 

"Do the flowers grow on it ?" No, not one, 
" What is its name ? " But I cannot tell. 

" Where — — 1 " Nowhere under the sun ! 

" Is it under the moon, then 1 " No, the light 
Has never touched it, and never can ; 

It is fashioned and formed of night, of night 
Too dark for the eyes of man. 

Yet I sometimes think, if my Faith had proved 

As a grain of mustard seed to me, 
I could say to this Mountain : '^ Be thou removed, 

And be thou cast in the sea ! '^ 



PLAYING BEGGARS. 133 



PLAYING BEGGARS. 

** Let us pretend we are two beggars." " No, 
For beggars are im something, something bad ; 

You Tcnow they are, because Papa says so, 

And Papa when he calls them that looks mad ; 

You should have seen him, how he frowned one day. 

When Mama gave his wedding-coat away." 

" Well, now he can't get married any more. 
Because he has no wedding-coat to wear. 

But that poor ragged soldier at the door 

Was starved to death in prison once somewhere. 

And shot dead somewhere else, and it was right 

To give him coats — because he had to fight. 

"Now let's be beggars." "They're im— posters. 
Yes, 

That 's what they are, im — postors ; and that means 
Kich people, for they all are rich, I guess — 

Eicher than we are, rich as Jews or queens, 

And they We just playing beggars when they cry " 

" Then let us play like they do, you and I." 



134 PLAYING BEGGARS. 

" Well, we 11 be rich and wear old naughty clothes." 
" But they 're not rich. If they were rich they 'd 
buy 

All the fine horses at the fairs and shows 

To give to General Grant. I '11 tell you why : 

Once when the rebels wanted to kill all 

The men in this world — he let Richmond fall ! 

" That broke them up ! I like the rebels, though, 
Because they have the curliest kind of hair. 

One time, so many years and years ago, 
I saw one over in Kentucky there. 

It showed me such a shabby sword, and said 

It wanted to cut off — Somebody's head ! 

" But — do play beggar. You be one ; and, mind, 
Shut up one eye, and get all over dust, 

And say this : 

' Lady, be so very kind 
As to give me some water. Well, I must 

Rest on your step, I think, ma'am, for a while 

I 've walked full twenty if I 've walked one mile. 

" * Lady, this is your little girl, I know : 
She is a beautiful child— and just like you ; 



PLAYING BEGGARS. 135 

You look too young to be her mother, though. 

This handsome boy is like his father, too : 
The gentleman was he who passed this way 
And looked so cross ? — so pleasant, I should say! 

" ' But trouble, Lady, trouble puts me wrong. 

Lady, I 'm sure you '11 spare a dress or two — 
You look so stylish. (Oh, if I was strong !) 

And shoes 1 Yours are too small. I need them new. 

The money thank you ! Now you have some tea. 

And flour, and sugar, you '11 not miss, for me ? 

" ' Ah, I forgot to tell you that my house 
Was burned last night. My baby has no bread, 

And I 'm as poor, ma'am, as a cellar-mouse. 

My husband died once ; my grandmother's dead — 

She was a good soul (but she 's gone, that 's true 

You have some coffee, madam ?) — so are you.' " 

" Oh, it 's too long. I can't say half of that ! 

I '11 not be an im — postor, any how. 
(But I should like to give one my torn hat, 

So I could get a prettier one, just now.) 
They 're worse than Christians, ghosts, or — anything ! 
1 '11 play that I 'm a great man or a king." 

1866. 



136 A child's first sight of snow. 



A CHILD'S FIRST SIGHT OF SNOW. 

Oh, come and look at his blue, sweet eyes, 
As, through the window, they glance around 

And see the glittering white surprise 
The Night has laid on the ground ! 

This beautiful Mystery you have seen, 
So new to your life, and to mine so old. 

Little wordless Questioner " What does it mean V 

Why, it means, I fear, that the world is cold. 



LAST WORDS. 

OVER A LITTLE BED AT NIGHT. 

Good-night, pretty sleepers of mine- 
I never shall see you again : 

Ah, never in shadow or shine ; 
Ah, never in dew or in rain ! 



LAST WORDS. 137 

In your small dreaming-dresses of white, 
With the wild-bloom you gathered to-day 

In your quiet shut hands, from the light 
And the dark you will wander away. 

Though no graves in the bee-haunted grass, 

And no love in the beautiful sky. 
Shall take you as yet, you will pass, — 

With this kiss, through these teardrops. Good- 
bye ! 

With less gold and more gloom in their hair. 
When the buds near have faded to flowers, 

Three faces may wake here as fair — 
But older than yours are, by hours ! 

Good-night, then, lost darlings of mine — 

I never shall see you again : 
Ah, never in shadow or shine ; 

Ah, never in dew or in rain ! 



138 MY ARTIST. 



MY ARTIST. 

[A. V. -p.— Nat 1864.] 

So slight, and just a little vain 
Of eyes and amber-tinted hair 

Such as you will not see again — 
To watch him at the window there, 

Why, you would not suspect, I say. 

The rising rival of Dor6. 

No sullen lord of foreign verse 

Such as great Dante yet he knows ; 

No wandering Jew's long legend-curse 
On his light hand its darkness throws ; 

Nor has the Bible suffered much. 

So far, from his irreverent touch. 

Yet, can his restless pencil lack 
A master Fancy, weird and strong 

In black-and-white — but chiefly black ! — 
When at its call such horrors throng % 



MY ARTIST. 139 

What Fantasies of Fairyland 

More shadowy were ever planned ! 

But giants and enchantments make 

Not all the glory of his Art : 
His vast and varied power can take 

In real things a real part. 
His latest pictures here I see : 
Will you not look at some with me ? 

First, " Alexander." From his wars, 
With arms of awful length he seems 

To reach some very-pointed stars, 

As if " more worlds " were in his dreams ! 

But, hush — the Artist tells us why : 

" You read — ' His hands could touch the sky. " ^ 

Here — mark how marvellous, how new ! — 

Above a drowning ship, at night, 
Close to the moon the sun shines, too, 

While lightnings show in streaks of white 

Still, should my eyes grow dim, ah, then 
Their tears will wet those sinking men ! 

^ Line from a familiar child's poem in a school-book. 



140 MY ARTIST. 

There in wild weather, quite forlorn, 
And queer of cloak, and grim of hat, 

With locks that might be better shorn, 
High on a steeple — who is that 1 

" It is the man who — I forget — 

Stood on a tower in the wet."^ 



His faults 1 He yet is young, you know — 
Four with his last year's butterflies. 

But think what wonders books may show 
AVhen the new Tennysons arise ! 

For fame that he might illustrate 

Let poets be content to wait ! 

^ " I stood on a tower in the wet, 

And Old Year and New Year met. " — Tennyson, 



THE SAD STORY OF A LITTLE GIRL. 141 



THE SAD STOEY OF A LITTLE GIRL. 

Oh, never mind her eyes and hair, 

(Though they were dark and it was gold.) 

That she was sweet is all I care 
To tell you — till the rest is told. 
" But is the story old ? " 

Hush. She was sweet Why do I cry ? 

Because — her mother loved her so. 
I told you that she did not die ; 

But she is gone. " Where did she go ? 

Ah me, — I do not know. 

" How old was she when she was sweet ? " 
Why, one year old, or two, or three. 

Here is her shoe — what little feet ! 
And yet they walked away, you see. 
(I must not say, from me.) 

" Did Gypsies take her ? " Surely, no. 

But — something took her ; she is lost : 
No track of hers in dew or snow, 



142 THE SAD STORY OF A LITTLE GIRL. 

No heaps of wild buds backward tossed, 
To show what paths she crossed. 

" Did Fairies take her 1 " It may be. 

For Fairies sometimes, I have read, 
AVill climb the moonshine, secretly, 

To steal a baby from its bed. 

And leave an imp instead. 

This Changeling, German tales declare. 
Makes trouble in the house full soon : 

Cries at the tangles in its hair. 
Beats the piano out of tune, 
And — wants to sleep till noon. 

And, while it keeps the lost one's face. 
It grows less lovely, year by year ■ 

Yes, in that pretty baby's place 

There was a Changeling left, I fear. 
. . . My little maid, do you hear 1 



AT HANS ANDERSEN'S FUNERAL. 143 



AT HANS ANDERSEN'S FUNERAL. 

Why, all the children in all the world had listened 
around his knee, 

But the wonder-tales must end ; 
So, all the children in all the world came into the 
church to see 

The still face of their friend, 

"But were any fairies there?" Why, yes, little 
questioner of mine. 

For the fairies loved him too ; 
And all the fairies in all the world, as far as the 
moon can shine, 

Sobbed, " Oh ! what shall we do ? " 

Well, the children who played with the North's 
white swans, away in the North's white snows. 
Made wreaths of fir for his head ; 
And the South's dark children scattered the scents 
of the South's red rose 

Down at the feet of the dead. 



144 AT HANS ANDERSEN'S FUNERAL. 

Yes, all the children in all the world were there with 
their tears that day ; 

But the boy who loved him best, 
Alone in a damp and lonesome place (not far from 
his grave) he lay — 

And sadder than all the rest. 

" Mother," he moaned, " never mind the king — why, 
what if the king is there ? 

Never mind your faded shawl : 
The king may never see it ; for the king will hardly 
care 

To look at your clothes at all." 

So, close to his coffin she crouched, in the breath of 
the burial flowers, 

And begged for a bud or a leaf : — 
" If I cannot have one, sirs, to take to that poor 
little room of ours. 

My boy will die of his grief ! " 

My child, if the king was there, and I think he was 
(but then I forget), 

Why, that was a little thing. 



AT HANS Andersen's funeral. 145 

Did a dead man ever lift his head from its place in 
the coffin yet, 

Do you think, to bow to the king ? 

'But could he not see him up in Heaven ? " I never 
was there, you know ; 

But Heaven is too far, I fear, 
For the ermine, and purple, and gold, that make up 
the king, to show 

So bravely as they do here. 

But he saw the tears of the peasant-child, by the 
beautiful light he took 

From the earth in his close-shut eyes ; 
For tears are the sweetest of all the things we shall 
see, when we come to look 

From the windows of the skies. 



146 A COAT-OF-ARMS. 



A COAT-OF-AEMS. 

EOSE says her family is so old — 

Older than yours, perhaps 1 Ah, me ! 

. . . (How wise she is ! Who could have told 
So much to such a child as she ? 

If these sweet sisters teach her this, 
Their veils are vanity, I fear.) . . . 

Pray, what comes next, my lovely miss ? 
You want a coat-of-arms, my dear ! 

Ah ! — other people have such things 1 
Eose had ancestors, too — an earl 1 

Tell Eose you have the blood of kings. 
And show it — when you blush, my girl ! 

I am not jesting ; I could name, 

Among the greatest, one or two 
Who have the right (divine) to claim 

Eemote relationship with you. 



A COAT-OF-ARMS. 147 

Alfred — who never burned a cake ! 

Arthur — who had no Table Round, 
Nor knight like Launcelot of the Lake, 

Nor ruled one rood of British ground ! 

Lear, who outraved the storm — at most 
The crown is straw that crowns old age ; 

And Hamlet's father he 's a ghost 1 

A real ghost, though — on the stage ! 

Edwards and Henrys— and of these 

Old Bluebeard Hal, from whom you take 

Your own bluff manners, if you please ! 

Let's love him, for Queen Catherine's 

sake ! 

Eichard from Holy Land, who heard^ 
Or did not hear — poor Blondel's song ; 

That other Richard, too, the Third, 

Whom Shakespeare does a grievous wrong ; 

But — still he murdered in the Tower 

The pretty princes 1 Charles, whose head, 

At Cromwell's breath, fell as a flower 
Falls at the frost — as I have read. 



148 A COAT-OF-ARMS. 

Another Charles, who had the crown 
Of Spain and Germany to hold, 

But at a cloister laid it down, 

And kept two hollow hands to fold. 

Philip the Handsome, who will rise 
From his old grave, the legends say, 

And show the sun those Flemish eyes 
That yes, I mean at Judgment Day. 

Louis the Grand Madam is so 

Like some one at his court, you hear 'i 

These Washington reporters, though, 
Were never at his court, I fear ! 

Great Frederick, with his snuff (I may 
Say something of great Peter, too), 

And one who made kings out of clay, 
And lost the world at Waterloo ! 

Of others, more than I could write, — 
In some still cave scarce known to men 

One sleeps, in his long beard's red light, 
A hundred years — then sleeps again ; 



A COAT-OF-ARMS. 149 

One — who with all his peerage fell 

By Fontarabia — sat forlorn 
In jewelled death at Aix ah ! well, 

Who listens now for Roland's horn ? 

One who was half a god, they say, 
Cried for the stars — and died of wine ; 

One pushed the crown of Rome away — 
And Antony's speech was very fine ! 

. . . The Shah of Persia, too ? Why, yes, 

He and his overcoat, no doubt. 
Oh, the Khedive will send, I guess. 



Half Egypt ^ — when he finds you out ! 

Victor of Italy, the Czar, 

Franz- Joseph, the sweet Spanish youth, 
And Prussian William, — these are all 

Your kinsmen, child, in very truth. 

Your coat-of-arms, then 1 forgot 

Some kings, the oldest, wisest, best ; — 

Take Jason's golden fleece, — why not ? 
Put Solomon's seal upon your crest. 

Allusion to the Khedive's present to an American lady, 



1875. 



150 HIDING THE BABY. 

There I can prove your Family's ties 
Bind you to all the great, I trust : 

Its Founder lived in Paradise ; 
And his ancestor was — the Dust. 

Can Rose say more 1 . . . Your ancient Tree 
Must hold a sword of fire (its root 

Down in the very grave must be) 
With serpent and — Forbidden Fruit. 



HIDING THE BABY. 

Hold him close, and closer hold him. 

(Ah, but this is time to cry !) 
Bring his pretty cloak and fold him 

From the Old Man going by. 
What Old Man ? — you cannot guess l 

Not the Old Man of the Sea, 
Nor the Mountains, I confess, 

Can be half so old as he. 



HIDING THE BABY. 151 

Could we only catch and bind him, 

To some prison, shutting low, 
Where the sun could never find him, 

This Old Man should surely go. 
We would steal his scythe away, 

(Grass should grow about our feet,) 
And he should not take to-day 

From us while to-day was sweet. 

Gypsy ways he has, most surely, 

(G3rpsy ways are hardly right ;) 
Wandering, stealing, yet securely 

Keeping somehow out of sight. 
From our trees the fruit he shakes ; 

Silver, lace, or silk we miss 
From our houses ; this he takes — 

This, and other things than this. 

Here he comes with buds that wither ; 

Here he comes with birds that fly ; 
Pretty playthings he brings hither. 

Just to take them by and by. 
He could find you in the night. 

Though you should put out the moon — 
He can see without a light. 

He will take the Baby soon. 



152 HIDING THE BABY. 

Head with gold enough about it 

Just to light this whole world through ; 
Ah, what shall we do without it 1 — 

Children, say, what shall we do 1 
Tell me, is there any place 

We can hide the Baby ? Say. 
Can we cover up his face 

While the Old Man goes this way 1 

There is one place, one place only. 

We can hide him if we must — 
Very still and low and lonely ; 

We can cover him with dust — 
Shut a wild rose in his hand ; 

Set a wild rose at his head ; 
This Old Man, you understand. 

Cannot take from us the dead. 



THE LITTLE BOY I DREAMED ABOUT. 153 



THE LITTLE BOY I DEEAMED ABOUT. 

[to another little boy.] 

This is the only world I know — 
It is in this same world, no doubt. 

Ah me, but I could love him so, 
If I could only find him out, — 
The Little Boy I dreamed about ! 

This Little Boy, who never takes 
The prettiest orange he can see, 

The reddest apple, all the cakes 

(When there are twice enough for three,) — 
Where can the darling ever be ? 

He does not tease and storm and pout 
To climb the roof, in rain or sun, 

And pull the pigeon's feathers out 
To see how it will look with none. 
Or fight with hornets — one to one ! 



154 THE LITTLE BOY I DREAMED ABOUT. 

He does not hide, and cut his hair, 
And wind the watches wrong, and cry 

To throw the kitten down the stair 
And see how often it can die. 
(It 's strange that you can wonder why !) 



He never wakes too late to know 
A bird is singing near his bed : 

He tells the tired moon : " You may go 
To sleep yourself." He never said, 
When told to do a thing, *'Tell Fred ! 



If I say " Go," he will not stay 
To lose his hat, or break a toy ; 

Then hurry like the wind away. 
And whistle like the wind for joy, 
To please himself — this Little Boy. 

Let any stranger come who can. 
He will not say — though it be true- 

" Old Lady " (or " Old Gentleman "), 
" I wish you would go home, I do ; 
I think my mama wants you to ! " 



THE LITTLE BOY I DREAMED ABOUT. 155 

— No, Fairyland is far and dim : 
He does not play in silver sand ; 

But if I could believe in him 
I could believe in Fairyland, 
Because you do not understand. 

Dead — dead 1 Somehow I do not know. 
The sweetest children die. We may 

Miss some poor footprint from the snow. 

That was his very own to-day 

" God's will " is what good Christians say. 

Like you, or you, or you can be 

When you are good, he looks, no doubt. 

I 'd give — the goldenest star I see 
In all the dark to find him out, 
The Little Boy I dreamed about ! 



156 CALLING THE DEAD. 



CALLING THE DEAD. 

My little child, so sweet a voice might wake 
So sweet a sleeper for so sweet a sake ; 
Calling your buried brother back to you 
You laugh and listen — till I listen too. 

. . . Why does he listen 1 It may be to hear 
Sounds too divine to reach my troubled ear ; 
Why does he laugh ? It may be he can see 
The face that only tears can hide from me. 

Poor baby faith, so foolish or so wise : — 

The name I shape out of forlomest cries 

He speaks as with a bird's or blossom's breath. 

How fair the knowledge is that knows not Death ! 

. . . Ah, fools and blind ! — through all the piteous 

years 
Searchers of stars and graves — how many seers. 
Calling the dead, and seeking for a sign. 
Have laughed and listened, like this child of mine i 



THE LAMB IN THE SKY. 157 



THE LAMB IN THE SKY. 

" There is a lamb," the children said ; — 

Sweet in the grass they saw it lie. 
But the Baby lifted his golden head, 

And looked for the lamb in the sky. 

Then the children laughed as they saw him look 
At the high white clouds, but I know not why,- 

For (have I not read in a beautiful Book 1) 
There is a Lamb in the sky. 



158 "I WANT IT YESTERDAY.' 



"I WANT IT YESTERDAY." 

" Come, take the flower — it is not dead; 

'Twas kept in dew the soft night through." 
"I will not have it now," he said : 

"I want it yesterday, I do." 

" It is as red, it is as sweet " — 
With angry tears he turned away, 

Then flung it fiercely at his feet. 
And said, " I want it — yesterday ! " 



INTO THE WOELD AND OUT. 

Into the world he looked with sweet surprise. 
The children laughed so when they saw his eyes. 

Into the world a rosy hand in doubt 

He reached ; — a pale hand took one rosebud out. 

"And that was all ? " — quite all, it may be. . . . But 
The children cried so when his eyes were shut. 



THE baby's brother. 159 



THE BABY'S BROTHER. 

The Baby is brought for the lady to see : 

" Was ever a lily-bud nicer than he ?" 

But the door opens fiercely on cooing and kiss, 

And — what merry outlaw from the greenwood is this? 

His brother 1 — who laughs at himself in my face : 
This picturesque vagabond, graceless with grace, 
Whose head, like a king's come to grief, is dis- 
crowned 

Ah, the kitten was wicked, and so she is drowned 1 

All flushed with the butterfly chase, how he stands, 
With a nestful of birds in his pitiless hands. 
Which he mildly assures me were torn from the tree. 
Or they 'd trouble their mother as Baby does me ! 

" Well, if Baby is sweet, you must love him right fast. 

Because don't you know? Why, because he'll 

not last ! 
For I was a baby, too, some of these days, 
And just look at me now!" he unsparingly says. 



160 CHILD'S-FAITH. 



CHILD'S-FAITH. 



These beautiful tales, I trust, are true. 

But here is a grave in the moss, 
And there is the sky. And the buds are blue, 

And a butterfly blows across. 

Yes, here is the grave and there is the sky ; — 

To the one or the other we go. 
And between them wavers the butterfly, 

Like a soul that does not know. 

Somewhere ? Nowhere ? Too-golden head, 

And lips that I miss and miss, 
You would tell me the secret of the dead — 

Could I find you with a kiss ! 

. . . Come here, I say, little child of mine. 
Come with your bloom and breath. 

(If he should believe in the life divine, 
I will not believe in death !) 

"Where is your brother ?" — I question low, 

And wait for his wise reply. 
Does he say, "Down there in the grave 1 " Ah, no ;- 

He says, with a laugh, " In the sky !" 



THE FUNERAL OF A DOLL. 161 

THE FUNERAL OF A DOLL. 

They used to call her Little Nell, 

In memory of that lovely child 
Whose story each had learned to tell. 

She, too, was slight and still and mild, 

Blue-eyed and sweet ; she always smiled. 
And never troubled any one 
Until her pretty life was done. 
And so they tolled a tiny bell 

That made a wailing fine and faint, 
As fairies ring, and all was well. 

Then she became a waxen saint. 

Her funeral it was small and sad. 

Some birds sang bird-hymns in the air. 
The humming-bee seemed hardly glad, 

Spite of the honey everywhere. 

The very sunshine seemed to wear 
Some thought of death, caught in its gold 
That made it waver wan and cold. 
Then, with what broken voice he had. 

The preacher slowly murmured on 
(With many warnings to the bad) 

The virtues of the darling gone. 

L 



162 THE FUNERAL OF A DOLL. 

A paper coffin rosily-lined 

Had Little Nell. There, drest in white, 
With buds about her, she reclined, 

A very fair and piteous sight — 

Enough to make one sorry, quite. 
And, when at last the lid was shut 

Under white flowers, I fancied but 

No matter. When I heard the wind 

Scatter Spring-rain that night across 
The doll's wee grave, with tears half -blind 

One child's heart felt a grievous loss. 

" It was a funeral. Mama. Oh, 
Poor Little Nell is dead, is dead ! 

How dark ! — and do you hear it blow 1 
She is afraid." And as she said 
These sobbing words, she laid her head 

Between her hands, and whispered : " Here 

Her bed is made, the precious dear — 

She cannot sleep in it, I know. 
And there is no one left to wear 

Her pretty clothes. Where did she go ? 
. . See, this poor ribbon tied her hair 1 " 



ONE YEAR OLD. 163 



ONE YEAR OLD. 

So, now he has seen the sun and the moon, 
The flower and the falling leaf on the tree 

(Ah ! the world is a picture that 's looked at soon). 
Is there anything more to see ? 

He has learned (let me kiss from his eyes that tear). 
As the children tell me, to creep and to fall ; — 

Then life is a lesson that 's taught in a year, 
For the Baby knows it all. 



164 ABOUT A MAGICIAN. 



ABOUT A MAGICIAN. 

Oh, there is a magician that I know, 

As strange as Hermann is " But he can wring 

A white bird's neck off in the market, though, 

Then— put it on and tell the bird to sing 
And fly like anything ! 

" What can he do ■?" Just wait and see him pasS: 
And you shall see, I think, what you shall see. 

The pretty baby, creeping in the grass, 
Will be a naughty boy, and climb a tree, 

If he goes by— ah, me ! 

Why, men and women in his path will rise — 
Yes, of the dust, or nothing, they are made. 

We see them in the sun with real eyes. 

And, while we look at them, he makes them fade 
To ghosts You are afraid ? 

Then, he can pass the guards in any light, 
And take the palace and the king away. 

He has not gone to sleep a single night, 

For many million years — some people say, — 
Nor rested for a day ! 



FORGIVENESS. 165 

We cannot kill him — though we sometimes try ; 

He kills us all yes, and the soldiers, too ! 

Seas are not deep enough to drown him. I 

Have heard that fire is — what he passes through 
Look, he is changing you ! 

Why, in a little while you will not be 

Yourself. And then What will he change you 

to, 
Poor, yellow-headed child, here at my knee 
Waiting to hear a foolish story through 1 

Ah, Fred, what if we knew ! 



FOEGIVENESS. 



Go, show the bee that stung your hand 
The sweetest flower in all the land ; 

Then, from its bosom, she will bring 
The honey that will cure the sting. 



166 EVERYTHING. 

EVEEYTHING. 

[a fairy tale.] 

You 'd call his room a pleasant place : 

Satin and rose-wood, lights and lace, 

And fruits and wines were there. (Ah, well !) 

And yet the rich man rang his bell, — 

When lo 1 he saw a fairy flit 

From outside dusk to answer it. 

Her flower-like eyes, so faint and blue, 
Looked at him through her veil of dew ; 
Though every gracious thing he had, 
His face was fretful, tired, and sad : — 
" Pray, sir," she whispered, " did you ring ? " 
He said : " Yes, I want — everything ! " 

The fairy laughed and walked away. 

Eagged and rosy at his play, 

A boy who had the grass, the dew. 

Birds, bees, the sun, the stars, like you. 

She met : " What do you want 1 " sighed she. 

" Oh, I have everything ! " said he. 



LITTLE christian's TROUBLE. 167 



LITTLE CHEISTIAN'S TEOUBLE. 

His wet cheeks looked as they had worn, 
Each, with its rose, a thorn, 

Set there (my boy, you understand 1) 
By his own brother's hand : 

" Look at my cheek. What shall I do 1 — 
You know I have but two ! " 

His mother answered, as she read 
What my Lord Christ had said, 

(While tears began to drop like rain :) 
" Go, turn the two again." 



168 MIDSUMMER-NIGHT FAIRIES. 



MIDSUMMER-NIGHT FAIRIES. 

(the FIREFLIES.) 

Let 's see : We believe in wings, 
We believe in the grass and dew, 

We believe in the moon — and other things 
That may be true. 

But are there any 1 Talk low ; 

(Look ! what is that eerie spark ?) 
If there are any, why, there they go, 

Out in the dark ! 



MISCELLANEOUS. 



HEARING THE BATTLE. 

[July 21, 1861.] 

One day in the dreamy summer, 
On the Sabbath hills, from afar 

We heard the solemn echoes 
Of the first fierce words of war. 

Ah, tell me, thou veiled Watcher 
Of the storm and the calm to come, 

How long by the sun or shadow 
Till these noises again are dumb. 

And soon in a hush and gHmmer 

We thought of the dark, strange fight, 

Whose close in a ghastly quiet 
Lay dim in the beautiful night. 

Then we talked of coldness and pallor, 
And of things with blinded eyes 

That stared at the golden stillness 
Of the moon in those lighted skies ; 



172 TO-DAY. 

And of souls, at morning wrestling 
In the dust with passion and moan, 

So far away at evening 

In the silence of worlds unknown. 

But a delicate wind beside us 
Was rustling the dusky hours, 

As it gathered the dewy odours 
Of the snowy jessamine-flowers. 

And I gave you a spray of the blossoms, 
And said : "I shall never know 

How the hearts in the land are breaking, 
My dearest, unless you go." 

Washington, D. C. 



TO-DAY. 

Ah, real thing of bloom and breath, 
I cannot love you while you stay. 

Put on the dim, still charm of death, 
Fade to a phantom, float away, 
And let me call you Yesterday ! 



TO-DAY. 173 

Let empty flower-dust at my feet 
Eemind me of the buds you wear ; 

Let the bird's quiet show how sweet 
The far-off singing made the air ; 
And let your dew through frost look fair. 

Li mourning you I shall rejoice. 
Go : for the bitter word may be 

A music — in the vanished voice ; 
And on the dead face I may see 
How bright its frown has been to me. 

Then in the haunted grass I '11 sit, 
Half tearful in your withered place, 

And watch your lovely shadow flit 
Across To-morrow's sunny face, 
And vex her with your perfect grace. 

So, real thing of bloom and breath, 

I weary of you while you stay. 
Put on the dim, still charm of death, 

Fade to a phantom, float away, 

And let me call you Yesterday ! 



174 SHAPES OF A SOUL. 



SHAPES OF A SOUL. 

White with the starlight folded in its wings, 
And nestling timidly against your love, 

At this soft time of hushed and glimmering things, 
You call my soul a dove, a snowy dove. 

If I shall ask you in some shining hour, 

When bees and odours through the clear air pass 

You '11 say my soul buds as a small flushed flower, 
Far off, half-hiding, in the old home-grass. 

Ah, pretty names for pretty moods ; and you. 
Who love me, such sweet shapes as these can see ; 

But, take it from its sphere of bloom and dew, 
And where will then your bird or blossom be ? 

Could you but see it, by life's torrid light, 

Crouch in its sands and glare with fire-red wrath. 

My soul would seem a tiger, fierce and bright 
Among the trembling passions in its path. 



STONE FOR A STATUE. 175 

And, could you sometimes watch it coil and slide, 
And drag its colours through the dust a while, 

And hiss its poison under-foot, and hide, 

My soul would seem a snake Ah, do not smile ! 

Yet fiercer forms and darker it can wear ; 

No matter, though, when these are of the Past, 
If as a lamb in the Good Shepherd's care 

By the still waters it lie down at last. 



STONE FOR A STATUE. 

TO A SCULPTOR. 

Leave what is white for whiter use. 

For such a purpose as your own 
Would be a dreary jest, a coarse abuse, 

A bitter wrong to snowy stone. 

Let the pure marble's silence hold 
Its unshaped gods, and do not break 

Those hidden images divine and old. 
To-day, for one mean man's small sake ! 



176 "I WISH THAT I COULD GO. 



"I WISH THAT I COULD GO." 

They who look backward always look through tears. 

So, very dimly, somewhere, I do see 
A door that opens into lonesome years. 

Furnished with — dust and silence ! What can be 
Sadder than absence of fair household sights, 
Belov6d pictures, warm and pleasant lights, 

In empty rooms where Does it call to me. 

That first child-voice which taught my life to know 
What music meant ? — 

" I wish that I could go." 

I turned and kissed her — "You had better stay." 
She heard the wood-bells ring among the herds : 

"I want to see so many lambs to-day," 
She answered in her little piteous words, 

Sweetly half-said and tenderly half-guessed ; 

" You said there was one robin with a nest 
Up in the apple-flowers. I love the birds — 



"I WISH THAT I COULD GO." 177 

Ever so many times — and you could show 

Me where they sleep. I wish that I could go." 

" It is too far. And here are butterflies ; 

Look — one — two — three. Go, catch them if you 
will." 
"I've seen all these too much — they hurt my 
eyes! 

They 're naughty things — they never can be still ! 
I would not try to catch another one 
Here, in the yard, to save its life ! I 'd run 

After some pretty new ones on the hill 
Away off — almost to the skies ! And, oh ! 
I'd be so sweet. I wish that I could go." 

Nor was it only toward the clear white light, 

Led subtly on by many a violet, 
She would have followed me. The great fierce 
Night 

Might lie beside our cottage, black and wet. 
And make mad hungry noises. Still, if I 
Thought fit to pass it, her appealing cry 

(The same that haunts me, sorrowfully, yet) 
Was with me always — most forlorn and slow : 
" If it is dark, I wish that I could go." 
M 



178 

" If it is dark ?" — what was the Dark ? She knew. 

Just a brief bridge which others must have passed — 
With a slight shiver, it might be — into 

A glitter of lamps : a life whose heart beat fast 
Under sweet colours, jewels, music, all 
The showers of fairy gifts that, faerily, fall 

On some Strange City, where Oh! faint and 

vast, 
Time lies behind, yet nearer seems to grow 
That eager sound ; 

" I wish that I could go." 

It is in my own soul. Myself a child. 

Some ghostly doorway with my grief I fill ; 

Eager for blossoms beautiful and wild 

Just out of reach : eager to climb some hill. 

So far away and almost to the skies, 

And (tired of old ones) find new butterflies. 

Some One seems gone whom I would follow still. 

Across the Dark I see your charmed glow, 

Strange City, shine 

"I wish that I could go." 



COUNTING THE GRAVES. 179 



COUNTING THE GRAVES. 

" How many graves are in this world ? " " Oh, child," 
His mother answered, " surely there are two." 

Archly he shook his pretty head and smiled : 
"1 mean in this whole world, you know I do." 

^' Well, then, in this whole world : in East and West 
In North and South, in dew and sand and snow, 

In all sad places where the dead may rest : 

There are two graves — yes, there are two, I know." 

" But graves have been here for a thousand years, — 
Or, for ten thousand 1 Soldiers die, and kings ; 

And Christians die — sometimes." "My own poor 
tears 
Have never yet been troubled by these things. 

. . . ''More graves within the hollow ground, in 
sooth, 

Than there are stars in all the pleasant sky 1 — 
Where did you ever learn such dreary truth. 

Oh, wiser and less selfish far than I ? " 



180 COUNTING THE GRAVES. 

" I did not know, — I who had light and breath : 
Something to touch, to look at, if no more. 

Fair earth to live in, who believes in death. 

Till, dumb and blind, he lies at one's own door ? 

... "I did not know — I may have heard or read — 
Of more; but should I search the wide grass 
through. 

Lift every flower and every thorn," she said, 

"From every grave — oh, I should see but two ! " 



A DEAD man's FRIENDS. 181 



A DEAD MAN'S FRIENDS. 

[in a house at WASHINGTON.] 

Gathered from many lands, 

A company still and strange, 

In the shadow of velvet and oak — 

Not one to another spoke ; 

With faces that did not change, 

Weird with the night and dim, 

They were looking their last on him. 

If ever men were wise, 

If ever women were fair, 

If ever glory was dust 

In a world of moth and rust, 

Why, this and these were there ; — 

Guests of the great, ah, me. 

How cold is your courtesy ! 

Does the loveliest lady of all 
Drop Titian's light from her hair, 
Down into his darkened eyes, — 
His, who in his coffin lies ? 



182 HIS SHARE AND MINE. 

Does that crouching Venus care 
That he must forget the charm 
Of her broken beautiful arm ? 

Yet these were the dead man's friends, - 
Wooed in his passionate youth, 
And won when his head was grey ; 
Look at them close, I pray. 
Ah, these he has loved, in sooth, 
Yet among them all, I fear. 
Is nothing so sweet as — a tear ! 



HIS SHAEE AND MINE. 

He went from me so softly and so soon. 

His sweet hands rest at morning and at noon ; 

The only task God gave them was to hold 
A few faint rosebuds — and be white and cold. 

His share of flowers he took with him away ; 
No more will blossom here so fair as they. 

His share of thorns he left — and, if they tear 
My hands instead of his, I do not care. 



HIS SHARE AND MINE. 183 

His sweet eyes were so clear and lovely, but 
To look into the world's wild light and shut : 

Down in the dust they have their share of sleep ; 
Their share of tears is left for me to weep. 

His sweet mouth had its share of kisses — Oh ! 
What love, what anguish, will he ever know 1 

Its share of thirst, and murmuring, and moan, 
And cries unsatisfied, shall be my own. 

He had his share of summer. Bird and dew 
Were here with him — with him they vanished, too. 

His share of dying leaves, and rains, and frost, 
I take, with every dreary thing he lost. 

The phantom of the cloud he did not see 
For evermore shall overshadow me. 

He, in return, with small, still, snowy feet, 
Touched the Dim Path, and made its twilight 
sweet. 



184 THE BIRD IN THE BRAIN. 



THE BIRD IN THE BRAIN. 

In a legend of the East there sits 

A bird with never a mate : 
Out of the dead man's brain it flits, — 
Too late for a prayer, too late, 
Repeating all the sin 
Which the beating heart shut in. 

Little child of mine, that I kiss and fold. 

With your flower-like hand at my breast, 
Already within this head all gold 
That bird is building a nest ! 

May it give but one brief cr}-, 
Sweet, when you come to die. 

My lord, the king, that shadowy bird 

Broods under your crown, I fear ; 
Take care, sir priest, lest you whisper a word 
That Heaven were loth to hear : — 

Ermine nor lawn will it spare ; 
Ah, king, ah, priest, take care i 



THE BIRD IN THE BRAIN. 185 

Oil, half-saint sister, so cloister-pale, 

That bird will be at your bier. 
Though you count your beads, though you wear your 
veil, 
Though you hold your cross right dear. 

When your funeral tapers come 
Will the weird of wing be dumb 1 

Poor lover, beware of the bud of the rose 

In the maiden's hand at your side : 
She has some secret, the dark bird knows, 
Which her youth's fair hair can hide , 

Turn, maid, from your lover, too — 
The bird knows more than you ! 



186 A PRETTIER BOOK. 



A PRETTIEE BOOK 

" He has a prettier book than this," 
With many a sob between, he said ; 

Then left untouched the night's last kiss, 
And, sweet with sorrow, went to bed. 

A prettier book his brother had 1 — 
Yet wonder-pictures were in each. 

The different colours made him sad ; 
The equal value — could I teach ? 

Ah, who is wiser 1 . . . Here we sit, 

Around the world's great hearth, and look, 

AVhile Life's fire-shadows flash and flit, 
Each wistful in another's book. 

I see, through fierce and feverish tears, 

Only a darkened hut in mine ; 
Yet in my brother's book appears 

A palace where the torches shine. 



A PRETTIER BOOK. 187 

A peasant, seeking bitter bread 
From the unwilling earth to wring, 

Is in my book ; the wine is red, 
There in my brother's, for the king. 

A wedding, where each wedding-guest 
Has wedding garments on, in his, — 

In mine one face in awful rest. 
One coffin never shut, there is ! 

In his, on many a bridge of beams 

Between the faint moon and the grass, 

Dressed daintily in dews and dreams, 
The fleet midsummer fairies pass ; 

In mine unearthly mountains rise, 
Unearthly waters foam and roll, 

And — stared at by its deathless eyes — 
The master sells the fiend a soul ! 

. . . Put out the lights. We will not look 
At pictures any more. We weep, 

*' My brother has a prettier book," 
And, after tears, we go to sleep. 



188 ASKING FOR TEARS. 



ASKING FOR TEARS. 

Oh, let me come to Thee in this wild way, 
Fierce with a grief that will not sleep, to pray 
Of all Thy treasures, Father, only one, 
After which I may say — Thy will be done. 

Nay, fear not Thou to make my time too sweet. 
I nurse a Sorrow, — kiss its hands and feet, 
Call it all piteous, precious names, and try, 
Awake at night, to hush its helpless cry. 

The sand is at my moaning lip, the glare 

Of the uplifted desert fills the air ; 

My eyes are blind and burning, and the years 

Stretch on before me. Therefore, give me Tears ! 



" A LETTER FROM TO-MORROW." 189 



''A LETTER FROM TO-MORROW." 
[the words of a child.] 

The child stood sweet and shy : 

" Now listen, — do not cry : 
* A Letter from To-morrow ' " he piteously said ; 

Then wavered, frowned, and blushed, 

And looked away and hushed 
The elfin voice that spoke through lips of human red. 

" I cannot read the rest," 

He prettily confessed, 
"Because — it is not plain!" Ah, would I hear it 
read? 

Poor little hands, to hold 

A thing so dim and cold, 
So full of sad shorn hair and last words of the dead ! 

Let it go where it will. 
There must be news of ill 
Send it to that great house across the shining street : — 



190 

To-night, in lights and lace, 
There Madam holds her place, 
Brief as the foreign flowers that drop dead at her feet. 

Madonna-hair and eyes 

Remind one of the skies, 
(No other picture there more subtly hides its paint). 

Divinely of the earth ! — 

That last dear dress from Worth 
Is too Parisian, perhaps, to fit a saint. 

This Letter's shadowy date, 

" To-morrow," folds her fate — 
(Reach for it, eager arm, so beautiful and bare !) 

She reads : " Your hair is grey, 

And men forget the day — 
Can you remember it^ — the day when you were 
fair!' 

He reads — her stately lord, 

Out-glittering some chance sword. 
Or right new gold, perhaps, wherewith his name was 
made : 

" Taken as in a snare ! — 

Called by a bird of the air 
To justice, go and give and take it, O betrayed !" 



191 

Still keep the Letter there : — 

His boy, the gracious heir 
To beauty, love, and hope — a brave enough estate, — 

Lets fall his toys and reads, 

" Wounded to death ! " and heeds. 
A coffin for white flowers stands ready at the gate. 

Give her the Letter — see 

How fairy-sweet is she, 
His girl in her first youth ! She droops her flower- 
like head, 

To read — no charmed tale 

Of bridal buds and veil ; 
But finds a broken ring and leave to earn her bread. 

Take, now, the Letter where 

There 's music in the air, 
And let the poet read : " The worm likes well youi 
book." 

Painter, if you are he. 

Master that is to be. 
Your name is not in all this Letter, — only look ! 

Some scented page will bring 
This Letter to the king ; 
To-morrow will be smooth with him and loyal-sweet : 



192 THE DEAD BOOK. 

" Your throne is shaken, sire — 
Your palace lost in fire ; 
Your prince must hide with sand the far tracks of his 

feet !" 

Shut close your Letter, child. 

The wind is weird and wild — 
I give it to the wind to bury in the sea, 

Full fathom five, and pray 

That till the Judgment Day 
No fisherman may bring such treasure up to me ! 



THE DEAD BOOK. 

Ah, from the yellow pages Time has torn 
The wonder-pictures seen by clearer eyes, 

And from the withered words the soul is worn ! 
. . . Kiss the Dead Book, and leave it where it lies. 

Kiss the Dead Book, and leave it in its place 



Youth's breathless bloom and dusty dreams among. 
I read, where shining poems show no grace, 
This dreary line, " You are no longer young." 



SONGS. 



N 



REPROOF TO A ROSE. 

Sad rose, foolish rose, 

Fading on the floor. 
Will he love you while he knows 

There are many more 

At the very door ? 

Sad rose, foolish rose, 

One among the rest : 
Each is lovely — each that blows ; 

It must be confest 

None is loveliest. 



Sad rose, foolish rose. 
Had you known to wait, 

And with dead leaves or with snow 
Come alone and late — 
Sweet had been your fate ! 



196 WHEN THE FULL MOON'S LIGHT IS BURNING. 

Sad rose, foolish rose, 

If no other grew 
In the wide world, I suppose 

My own lover, too, 

Would love — only you ! 



WHEN THE FULL MOON'S LIGHT IS 
BURNING. 

When the full moon's light is burning 

At its brightest, it is pleasant, 
Sometimes, blindly to sit yearning 

For the slightness of the crescent ; 

When the finished rose is shining 
In the sun with flushed completeness, 

For the vanished bud repining, 
Wilfully to miss its sweetness. 



THE SONG NO BIRD SHOULD SING IN VAIN. 197 



THE SONG NO BIED SHOULD SING 
IN VAIN. 

The song no bird should sing in vain, 
The song no bird will sing again, 
I did not hear until the fleet 
Air-singer lost it at my feet. 

The wind that blew the enchanted scent 
From some divine still continent, 
Beat long against my window, but 
It found and left my window shut. 

The king's fair son, who came in state. 
With my lost slipper, for its mate, 
I only saw through my regret — 
Oh, I am in the ashes yet ! 



198 COME, WAILING WINDS ; COME, BIRDS OF NIGHT. 



COME, WAILING WINDS; COME, BIRDS 
OF NIGHT. 

Come, wailing winds ; come, birds of night ; 

Come, Time, and bring the ivy vine 
To wind in constant clasp and bright 

This desolated pride of mine ; — 
Come with your mildew and your mould 

For these rich draperies, these fair halls ; 
Come with your mosses, and enfold 

These humbled towers, these broken walls ! 



SAD SPRING-SONG. 199 



SAD SPEING-SONG. 

Blush and blow, blush and blow, 
Wind and wild-rose, if you will ; 

You are sweet enough, I know — 

You are sweet enough, but, oh ! 

Lying lonely, lying low. 

There is something sweeter still. 

Come and go, come and go, 

Suns of morning, moons of night ; 

You are fair enough, I know — 

You are fair enough, but oh ! 

Hidden darkly, hidden low, 

Lies the light that gave you light. 



200 SAY THE SWEET WORDS. 



SAY THE SWEET WORDS. 

Say the sweet words, say them soon ; 

You have said the bitter, — 
Changed to tears, by this still moon 

You may see them glitter. 

Say the sweet words soon, I pray — 

Mine is piteous pleading : 
Haste to draw the steel away, 

Though the wound keep bleeding. 



FULFILMENT. 201 



FULFILMENT. 

He who can sing a song more sweet 
Than skylarks learn in finest air, 

Hears subtler music at his feet 
Hum in the grass — at his despair. 

He who has found a sudden star, 
With new, quick halos for his head, 

Sighs for some brighter one afar, 
That sits for ever veiled, instead. 

He who has dared, though half-afraid. 
To make such beauty of the stone 

As God from dust has never made. 
At last looks on it with a moan. 

And she who wears such threads of lace 
As fairies might from moonshine spin. 

Will find, if any flower she trace, 
The loveliest leaf was not put in. 



202 GOOD-BYE. 

Yet holds this world one perfect thing, 
That leaves no room to weep or pine ; 

You gave it to me with a ring, 
To be for ever only mine. 



GOOD-BYE. 

[a woman's song.] 



Good-bye, if it please you, sir, good-bye. 
This is a world where the wild-swans fly. 
This is a world where the thorn hangs on 
When the rose, its twin, is gone, is gone. 
Good-bye — good-bye — good-bye. 

Good-bye, if it please you, sir, good-bye. 
You are here and away — I care not why. 
This is a world where a man has his will, 
A world where a woman had best be still. 
Good-bye — good-bye — good-bye. 



LIFE AND DEATH. 203 



LIFE AND DEATH. 

If I had chosen, my tears had all been dews ; 

I would have drawn a bird's or blossom's breath, 
Nor outmoaned yonder dove. I did not choose — 

And here is Life for me, and there is Death. 

Ay, here is Life. Bloom for me, violet ; 

Whisper me, Love, all things that are not true ; 
Sing, nightingale and lark, till I forget — 

For here is Life, and I have need of you. 

So, there is Death. Fade, violet, from the land ; 

Cease from your singing, nightingale and lark ; 
Forsake me, Love, for I without your hand 

Can find my way more surely to the dark. 



204: MAKING PEACE. 



MAKING PEACE. 

After this feud of yours and mine 

The sun will shine ; 
After we both forget, forget, 

The sun will set. 



I pray you think how warm and sweet 

The heart can beat ; 
I pray you think how soon the rose 

From grave-dust grows. 



Sweet World, if you will hear me now : 
I may not own a sounding Lyre 

And wear my name upon my hroio 
Like some great jeivel quick withjire. 



But let me, singing, sit apart, 
In tender quiet loith a few, 

And keep my fame upon my heart, 
A little blush-rose wet with dew. 



ClJinimrgfj SHnf&ersttg ^itzz: 

T. AND A. CONSTABLE, PRINTERS TO HER MAJESTY. 



MRS. PIATT'S POEMS. 

Published by HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO., Boston and New York. 
Witk Extracts from American Critical Opinions. 



A WOMAN'S POEMS. [By Sarah M. B. Piatt.] 

I Vo/. i6mo. $1.50. 



The Independent (New York). 
' We believe that her first poems were published in T/ie Lo7iisville Journal, where, 
as Miss Sallie M. Bryan, she achieved an enviable repute among readers of taste and 
culture in the South-West. In quantity it is not a great book ; but in quality, in 
delicacy, originality, artistic feeling, and power, no American poetess has given us a 
greater one — and here we say less than might be said of it. There is no page of its 
scant hundred and thirty which does not bear witness to her genius ; and the expres- 
sion is always as new as the thought is fine and sweet. Of other young poets you 
say that one writes like Tennyson, another like Longfellow; but Mrs. Piatt, for good 
or ill, writes like herself. We think she does so for good. ... At her worst she 
is obscure : at her best she writes poetry delightful for its music, its tender sentiment, 
its subtle thoughtfulness. We detect, also, in this volume that new flavour which 
the maturing life of the West adds to American literature— a flavour not dependent 
at all upon a choice of Western themes, or "dialect," but imbuing the treatment of 
all subjects ; something different from the moralised ideality of New England poetry ; 
something nearer to pure feeling, easier, simpler, and more familiar, yet delicate and 
authentic. . . . There are many little poems about children in the book, and all 
are marked by delicate thoughtfulness, and this half-sad, half-playful grace ; and, 
like this poem, they are all different from other poems about children. . . . Within 
the somewhat narrow bounds set them, they are to be highly valued, and we think 
that none who approaches them in the sympathetic temper which all poems require, 
will fail to be charmed with them, whilst all must feel their originality.' 

The Atlantic Monthly (Boston). 
' We like them so well for what ^they are, that we shall be far from making it a cause 
of offence in the author that she has not written like a man. It appears to us that 
the only quality which it is worth while for women to contribute to literature is pre- 
cisely this feminine quality. . . . The longest piece is " The Brother's Hand," 
a story of our own modern life, told with strength and clearness, and turning upon 
one of the many tragical possibilities of the war. It is effectively managed through- 
out ; and it has passages of peculiar beauty and power. . . . We think of no 
woman poet in America who equals her in authenticity of touch, and none surpasses 
her in certain subtle graces which we hope have been discerned in the poems we 
have quoted from her book. . . . Since these are avowedly " A Woman's Poems," 
we need not withhold the fact that they have their affectations ; still, they are true 
poems, to be valued for their pure, good, natural feeling, and their excellent art.' 

New York Evening Post. (Edmund C. Stedman.) 

' When she is at her best she is charming. . . . Her affections are tender and 
genuine, her thoughts pure, and her language has a winsome grace of its own. . . . 



She has a special gift of seeing into a child's heart, and all of her songs to or concern- 
ing little ones are full of the heaven which lies about us in our infancy. . . . Else- 
where in her poetry we discern the higher gifts — genuine imagination, and mastery 
of a strong theme. "The Brother's Hand" is the longest, and, in this regard, the 
most important poem in the volume, though not given the place of honour. It is 
marked by fine colour, successful handling of an effective metre, and some dramatic 
power.' 

The Cincinnati (Ohio) Gazette. 

' Mrs. Piatt's book is rightly named, for the finest feminine qualities characterise 
its contents. Here we may see faithfully and delicately pictured girl, sweetheart, 
wife, and mother ; and, as faithfully, the ideal woman alone, with her own soul and 
its creation.' 

The Boston Commonwealth. 

' These poems are marked by a certain half-careless grace, and embody fancies and 
shadowy suggestions, half uttered, airily hinted, hid in musical murmurs. They 
affect one like a song at a distance.' 



A VOYAGE TO THE FORTUNATE ISLES, Etc. 

By Sarah M. B. Piatt. 

I Vol. i6mo. $1,50. 



The Boston Advertiser. (Miss Harriet W. Preston.) 
' Mrs. Piatt's poems are positively original. . . . Her strong individuality 
makes every verse a curiosity, and the quality of her voice is wholly new. It is a 
pure soprano — no doubt of that — very high, but never shrill; sweet, yet rather bitter- 
sweet ; plaintive, yet full of vivacity. But how can one describe a voice ? . . . 
The " Voyage to the Fortunate Isles," which gives name to the volume, reminds one 
of Browning's " Sad Rhyme," only in its moral. The music of it is as different from 
that manly, sombre strain, as strangely and piercingly feminine, as the tones of Camilla 
Uso's violin. "If I were a Queen" is very wayward and charming. We cannot 
quote, because one verse is not more charming than another. "The Funeral of a 
Doll" and " The Clothes of a Ghost" are as weird as Pictor Ignotus himself, but 
they are not in the least mad. One of Mrs. Piatt's peculiarities is the perfectly- 
natural way in which she allows the talk of children to come into her verses. Chil- 
dren in poetry are usually as stiff and amazing as children on the stage, — especially 
when they are introduced by way of justifying and elucidating the moral reflections 
of their elders, but Mrs. Piatt's children are for ever interrupting her descant with 
chirpings like those of May birds, with remarks idly profound, and questions so 
exasperating in their artless difficulty, that they at once carry conviction that they 
are real. . . . Within the limits of her enforced power she does not compose, 
she creates.* 

The Atlantic Monthly. (W. D. Howells.) 
' In reading Mrs. Piatt's little book of poems, one has none of the uncertainty 
that troubles one about George Eliot's painfully thought-out verse. The presence 
of innate poetic genius of the subtlest kind, finding its natural expression in a pensive 
music, is felt at once. . . . Here in this volume is poetry as delicate and purely 
poetic as ever was given to the world. . . . For others equally characteristic 
the reader must read "The Palace-Burner," ... "I Wish that I could Go," 



*' If I were a Queen." All are perfect of their kind, and each will give the reader 
something to think over long after he could have forgotten whole volumes of ordinarily 
pleasing verse. There is indeed no poem here without its sharp suggestion, and we 
name a few because we cannot name them all. " The Black Princess," " A Doubt," 
. . . and that beautiful wise poem which gives its name to the book, we cannot 
leave unmentioned. . . . Because an author is not always as immortal as his 
book, and because the fame that comes soonest is sweetest, even when well earned, 
we wish that every reader of ours might pay tribute to this woman of genius by 
reading her book.' 

The Philadelphia Evening Bulletin. 
'A former volume, called "A Woman's Poems," was full of charming, tender, 
earnest thought, expressed in most polished verse. This new volume goes further, 
and reveals a distinct poetic individuality that is fully as much entitled to recognition 
as is that of Jean Ingelow, or Adelaide Procter, or many other English writers that 
are read and quoted most lovingly in this country. For ourselves, we give the pre- 
ference to our native poetess, who imitates no one, and yet touches the heart of the 
reader with the most sympathetic impress. ' 

The Christian Union. (Prof. Moses Colt Tyler.) 
' Whatever be the unnameable quality which separates the poet from the merely 
clever and facile verse-maker, we are at once made aware of its presence as we take 
to ourselves these pretty pages, up and down which our eyes glide under the sweet 
beguiling of that light that is not upon land or sea. 1'his poet's range is not a wide 
one, nor are her ascensions of the highest ; but within the realm where dwells the 
heart of girlhood, womanhood, and motherhood, in what we may suppose to be its 
usual vicissitudes of hope, gaiety, disenchanting experience, broken illusions, love 
bearing its fruit of bliss and pain, the dear purchase of mid-life's calmness at the 
'cost of ineffable heart-aches, her utterance is clear, firm, original, imaginative, and 
passionate. Nor has she yet reached the top of her own powers ; for if life be kind 
to her, she will not leave off this gracious culture of herself until she has found a 
more adequate expression and a wider and more various compass. But if we were 
challenged to prove her poetic vocation by the crude credentials of samples torn out 
of her book, we could easily respond by quoting many snatches in which the forceful 
presence of genuine poetic imagery asserts itself. Here, for instance, is a picture put 
upon the canvas in almost a single stroke, but with how vivid and strong a likeness ! — 

"The great fierce Night 
JNIight lie beside our cottage, black and wet, 
And make mad, hungry noises." 

And notice the poet's way of telling this sad truth, that many a preacher has preached 
in prose-fashion, but which in this pictured shape comes to us with a new impres- 
siveness : — 

"Does not Regret 

Walk with us always from the door 

That shuts behind us, though we leave 

Not much to make us grieve." 

So, too, in just four lines the poet compresses poetically the whole argument of the 
hard and earthly present issuing in one triumphant conclusion towards the vague 
deliverance of the future : — 

" .Scant bread and bitter, heat and snow, 

Rude garments, souls too blind and worn 
To climb to Christ for comfort : these 
Are here. And there — the Seas." ' 



The Congregationalist (Boston). 
'They are simple in structure, thoughtful, musical, with here and there a plaint, 
and now and then a longing, expressive of emotions M'hich will awaken responses in 
the common heart, and delivered with a touch that is both precise and delicate. To 
open this volume once is to turn to it again and again.' 

The Independent. 
* Some of the poems are simply delightful — an adjective which belongs, for 
instance, to these eight lines : — 

'■ When the full moon's light is burning 
At its brightest, it is pleasant, 
Sometimes, blindly to sit j^earning 
For the slightness of the crescent ; 

" When the finished rose is shining 
I In the sun with flushed completeness. 

For the vanished bud repining, 
Wilfully to miss its Sweetness" — 

lines which well phrase the moods we all have when the present seems poor enough, 
and the past sweeter than it ever was in fact. But Mrs. Piatt's verse, while it is 
generally musical and graceful, is not possessed of these good qualities alone ; some 
of her poems go into the depths of thought and emotion. To mention but one poem, 
and that a poem which some of our readers know — " A Doubt " seems to us excellently 
to express, in a vividly dramatic way, the chill freezing atmosphere of suspicion 
which is glad to enwrap all the intellect and emotion it can steal upon unawares. 
From the book we shall not quote, so much of it is not new to our pages ; but we 
hope many of our readers will go to it, sure to get from it rarest pleasure.' 

The Boston Commonwealth. 
' Mrs. Piatt excels in her glancing, vivid pictures, softened by the sweetest and 
tenderest feeling, generally drawn from child-life, as it touches the mother's thinking 
heart — if we may use such an expression.' 

The Christian Era (Boston). 
' Tenderness rather than pathos is the characteristic attribute of her genius. , Her 
themes seem to be almost wholly suggested by her personal experience of life ; she 
writes what she has felt and, observed ; therefore her poetry is limited in its range, 
and will fail to secure the sympathy of those who expect poets to be philosophers and 
prophets, as well as sweet singers. . . . Lovers, wives, and mothers, however, will 
highly appreciate Mrs. Piatt's poems, for, somehow, to them sadness is a congenial 
and cultivated emotion.' / 

The Repository (Boston). 
'But the poems are mostly fanciful and slight. We see neither attempt nor 
indication of the sustained power and vigour. of thought on which the nobler achieve- 
ments of poetry depend; and we should be far from pronouncing her, as some have, 
the only American woman who has written true poetry, or even the best poet among 
American women. . . . Her style has been justly characterised by the word 
feminine. But we could not so far exalt this quality as to agree with the Atlantic 
Editor : "It appears to us that the only quality which it is worth while for women 
to give to literature is precisely this quality." Why should feminine genius be 
restricted to these narrow bounds any more than masculine genius ? Is it not worth 



while for a woman to give the utmost she has to give, be the quality what it may ? 
But we make no complaint of Mrs. Piatt that she follows this rule and gives us 
simply of herself. Very dainty and sweet are the pages before us. As a writer of 
those little magazine poems of sentiment that, like bird-songs, sing themselves into 
the heart wherever they go, as a mother most tender and sympathetic, as a dreamer 
with fancy filled with romantic memories and regrets, our poet does stand unsur- 
passed. As an example of the first, let us give the little idyl "There was a 
Rose." . . . Preference must be given to all those poems whose inspiration she 
finds in her children. She has a keen appreciation of the poetic in their simple-wise 
sayings, and "catches them up into a beautiful morality" in a strain always grace- 
ful, though often sad. The beginning of "Marble or Dust?" is so touchingly 
poetic : — 

" A child beside a statue said to me, 

With pretty wisdom very sadly just — 
' That man is Mr. Lincoln, Mama. He 
Was made of marble : we are made of dust.' " 

. . . There is a world of self-revelation in the poem "A Doubt," that accounts for 
the yearning sadness which touches us with a subtle pain in all these pages. Wc 
give it, not more for this than as the supreme example of that delicate elusive grace 
of expression in which Mrs. Piatt singularly excels.' 

The New York Tribune. (Mrs. L. C. Moulton.) 
' The author has a touch all her own. Those readers who love Christina Rosetti 
will also take Mrs. Piatt into their hearts. With utter unlikeness of manner, I 
recognise in these two many of the same qualities. Both love minor chords. Both 
are deeply religious. Both see, in what we call the facts of life, shadows whose 
substance is immortal. . . . This little volume has room in it for love and longing, 
and hope and despair, and aspiration, but no space for the commonplace. The 
initial poem, "A Voyage to the Fortunate Isles," tells the old, old story of some 
who set out to sail toward the Fortunate Islands;, and never knew till the sad end 
that they had left those Islands of the Blest behind them. " If I were a Queen" 
is in the same key. The writer fancies all the great glories of all great queens, and 
knows, at last, that she would rather die among her own familiar faces than reign 
elsewhere. Let no one who loves read the poem entitled " Sometime," unless he 
would have his very heart ache with prophetic pain. ... If I were to mention all the 
poems I particularly like ... I see that my list would be so long as to be practi- 
cally a table of contents.' 

The Advance (Chicago). 
' Her thought is always womanly, pure, good. Her sentiment is, natural, tender, 
animated, delicate, and yet not lacking in strength. Her imagination is vigorous, 
alert, skilful, ready to image to the sense the form of a thought or build the grace- 
ful fabric of a fancy, usually clear and definite as a fact. And not the least of her 
delicacies is her exquisite ear for sound. Not only is there almost always a fine 
melody pervading her verse, but, more than that, a peculiar music in her lines that 
lingers in the ear after they are read, and which seems to belong as really to the 
though); or feeling which is finding expression, as does the laugh or cry of a child to 
his sad or merry moods. She has not the strong wings of imagination and of 
thought to soar to the heights of sublime emotion, or to sound the depths of philoso- 
phic intuition, as Mrs. Browning could, but within a certain range she sings as 
purely and sweetly as Mrs. Browning.' 



The Cincinnati Enquirer. 
' She has more imagination and strength than any other American poetess, and 
•we do not know that we have a right to expect greater things from her than are 
contained in this volume, but we shall hope for them.' 



THAT NEW WORLD, AND OTHER POEMS. 

By Sarah M. B. Piatt. 

I Vol. i6mo. $1.50. 



The Woman's Journal (Boston). 

' Her imagination, pure and deep, is fed by an intense love of nature, and a yearning 
after the holiest and divinest in life. A minor chord runs through all she writes, but 
a playful fancy crosses and winds around it, giving a sweet charm to almost every 
stanza of her varied themes. Child nature is an open book to her loving eyes, and 
she questions apd answers with an instinct of a true child-lover, and the reader feels 
that the experiences of which she writes must have come to her from her own home- 
life, with its joy and sadness. Two verses from " The Bird in the Brain" will give 
some idea of the spell of thought and beauty which lurks in almost all Mrs. Piatt 
writes : — 

" In a legend of the East there sits 
A bird with never a mate ; 
Out of the dead man's brain it flits — 
Too late for a prayer, too late, 

Repeating all the sin 

Which the beating heart shut in. 

" Little child of mine, that I kiss and hold. 
With your flower-like hand, to my breast, 
Already within this head all gold 
That bird is building a nest ! — 

May it give but one brief cry, 
Sweet, when you come to die ! " ' 

The Atlantic Monthly (W. D. Howells). 
' No woman now writing has a more characteristic style ; and in taking up a 
fresh collection of her poems you may be sure that no wavering or uncertain appeal 
will be made to your interest. If the range of her poetry is narrow, it goes deep ; 
it gains in poignancy for loss of breadth, and in the present volume her peculiar 
intensity becomes an edge, a point of the keenest pathos. If so few words could 
justly dismiss it, we should content ourselves with saying that it was the most 
entire expression of Bereavement we know in literature, for that defines if it does 
not fully praise the book. . . . Not one of these striking poems is without some 
sad and joyless grace which we do not know in any other touch than this poet's. 
Read, for example, the mystical verses, " Enchanted," and j'ou must feel the spell, 
and recognise your own impulse — your own, however rare — in that of her who 

" sat in a piteous hut. 
In a wood where poisons grew." 



We sometimes still talk of Poe's weird power, but here is a poem that surpasses his 
careful elaborations in its wild fascination as the thing surpasses the picture of the 
thing. . . . One of the tenderest poems is the fairy tale called " The Gift of Empty 
Hands," and among the grimmest — quiet, cold in the irony that moans and weeps 
in others— is "The King's Memento Mori." We name these poems without 
quoting them, because we expect the reader to go for them to the book, where 
there are many that we cannot give, like " Her Cross and Mine," a whole drama in 
six stanzas ; " Counting the Graves," one of those colloquies with a child, in which 
the simple answers are darkened with a complex melancholy meaning ; . . . 
" Folded Hands," the tragedy of aspiration beyond the power of performance — a 
difficult something very thoroughly felt and triumphantly expressed. Certain of 
the poems strike one with awe for the fierce sincerity with which the cut flowers of 
consolation are thrust aside and the ineffable loss through death is confronted. 
Such a one is that called " No Help," with its tremendous close : — 

" God cannot help me, for God cannot break 
His own dark law — for my poor sorrow's sake." 



" We Two" is another such a poem, with that strain of tragic irony in it which is 
somewhere felt in nearly all the pieces, and which in the poem "Giving up the 
World," is so poignant. ... It is a pleasure for every one loving literature to find, 
in this new book of Mrs. Piatt's, the development of her genius rather than her 
mannerism. Our geniuses are not so many that we can afford to have any of them 
fall a prey to eccentricity or self-conceit.' 

The Library Table (New York). 
* There is an almost feverish intensity in Mrs. Piatt's verses, a fierce contained 
heat under a surface of almost marble coldness. Seldom^never have we taken up 
a new volume of poems that have so impressed us with their force of feeling held 
under powerful control, yet breaking forth at last into strains of impassioned verse. 
Yet Mrs. Piatt is not lyrical ; her emotion is too profound, too contained, too 
intimately bound up with her thought, to admit of lyrical expression ; it instinc- 
tively seeks relief in objective forms, upon which the imagination can rest. There 
is, too, something more universal in her mood of passion than that merely personal 
feeling which inspires lyrical song. One seems to hear a cry out of the very heart 
of the age, expressive of pain, anger, despair, of an unutterable love reaching forth 
to skies, that veil their mysteries to her longing vision, and an unutterable sorrow 
that will not be comforted by the sleek assurances of the comfortable and happy. 
Partial quotations would not do justice to Mrs. Piatt's genius. In the intensity of 
her feeling, and the white heat of imagination which it enkindles, she can hardly 
pause for those felicitous wordings, those quaintly wrought fancies, upon which our 
modern poets so pride themselves, and which the reviewer picks out so tenderly to 
deck his page withal. Mrs. Piatt's verse seems to flow without efl"ort, simple, 
direct, natural, in order, as if the words marshalled themselves of their own accord 
in obedience to a hidden music. Her verse accordingly has much of the lucent 
beauty and fluent outline of an antique marble, though the thought that inspires it 
touches some of the deepest chords of the modern consciousness. . . . Mrs. Piatt's 
poems are strongly and distinctively womanly ; they are the utterances, in this age 
of unbelief or half-belief, of woman's cry of anguish and despair, when she hears the 
dirge of "dust to dust" over the graves of her dead. In all that concerns the 
deepest demands of our nature men are more cowardly than women. We hush up 
this question of immortality, of " that other world," feigning to ourselves to believe 
what in secret has no sure hold upon our convictions. But the earnest religious 



8 

nature of woman, once unsettled by the currents of modern thought, cannot rest in 
this self-delusion, and cries out almost fiercely amid the darkness and from behind 
the prison bars for some gleam of the light of another world, for a rending of the veil 
that hides from her the eyes that once looked up to hers, or else, by a reversion of 
feeling, she settles down to her despair, and makes religion of her unbelief. But if 
ever we are to have a really vital belief in immortality, it is through this very bold- 
ness and frankness, this flinging aside of weak self-deception, and courageous 
facing the question in the light of modern thought. Sometime, possibly, the con- 
sciousness of the race will rise to a really vital insight of immortality. - Meanwhile 
there is no gain in a self-pretence, which sufficiently evinces its hollowness by its 
slight hold upon the life. How this vision is to be won Mrs. Piatt herself perhaps 
suggests in verses which we cannot refrain from quoting: ["Calling the Dead."l 
Since Mrs. Browning no woman has given a more impassioned expression — and with 
more grace and beauty of poetic form — to some of the profoundest instincts of the 
womanly nature than the author of this little volume, in which one finds reserves 
of power that shall surely gain expression in poetic forms of still larger reach.' 

The Morning Star (Dover, N. H.). 

* The sweet, tender, gentle spirit that breathes through these poems gives them 
an inexpressible charm. They are delightful — that is, when they are not too sad ; 
and even when one finds a tear falling in sympathy with some line or stanza, he is 
forced to almost express himself with joy over the perfection with which it is 
rendered. Mrs. t'iatt writes poetry. That cannot be denied. Or, if it were, with 
this volume, and "A Voyage to the Fortunate Isles," that preceded it, we could 
successfully maintain our first assertion. It must have been real experience that has 
prompted many of her poetic utterances. Thus they appeal to the reader, and he 
often finds himself saying, " I have felt that"— and, " It is as though I had uttered 
my own feeling," albeit he might never have been able to utter the experience as 
Mrs. Piatt has done. But we know, nevertheless, that we have found poetry and 
a poet when we are affected in that waj-.' 

The Christian Union. 

' Mrs. Piatt is one of the few American woman poets for whom all women have a 
strong affection.' 

The Boston Gazette. 

' Mrs. Piatt's poetry will wear well, and constantly grow in estimation. She is 
unlike any of our native writers, and the quality of her work improves with each 
successive effort.' 

The New York Tribune. (Bayard Taylor.) 
'Mrs. Piatt has written very little that is not worthy of careful reading. She 
belongs to the class of poets which came into birth with Mrs. Browning, and includes 
(with differences in both cases) Adelaide Procter and Christina Rosetti ; yet she is 
perhaps more strictly individual in her work than either of these two. To the class. 
Song seems to carry with it a peculiar sanctity: it is oftener put on as a robe of 
sacrifice than as a festal garment. The strain involuntarily becomes serious, if not 
sad, and there is a drop of sacramental wine in the sweetest vintage. But as Mrs. 
Piatt sings, so imcst she sing ; it is impossible to doubt the purity, elevation, and 
utter sincerity of the nature which breathes through her poems. . , . Within her 
range of form she is never careless or indifferent ; what she writes bears the stamp of 
refinement and unstudied grace.' 



The New York Evening Post. 
' Like music, it has the power to stir profound depths of feeling at times. No 
reader who has the least appreciation of the simply and daintily beautiful in song 
can fail to find something on every page to reward him abundantly.' 

The Boston Transcript. 

' Some of these poems will be read over and over again for their sweetness and pathos.' 



DRAMATIC PERSONS AND MOODS. 

By Sarah M. B. Piatt. 

I Vol. i6mo. , ^1.2^. 



The Literary World (Boston). 
' Rarely does one find among contemporary poets an equal depth and intensity of 
feeling, or superior tact and delicacy in the choice of subjects. Her expression, too, 
is often forcible, and always terse. What could be better in this respect than these 
lines?— 

'■ As the tree falls, one says, 
So shall it lie. It falls, remembering 

The sun and stillness of its leaf-green days. 
The moons it held, the nested bird's warm wing, 
The promise of the buds it wore. 
The fruit— it never bore." 

Her dramatic power is also unusual, and compares not unfavourably with that of 
modern English masters whom she seems to have studied. . . . Among the most 
skilful and worthy of her longer poems we notice "A Lesson in a Picture" and 
"After the Quarrel." Some of her "Double Quatrains" are also worthy of note. 
. . . Among the shorter pieces none are better than "Life and Death" and these 
two stanzas entitled " The Descent of the Angel." ' 

Springfield (Mass.) Republican. 

' For certainly her strain is as beautiful as it is singular ; there is not in English 
poetry one more original, more purely the singer's own. But its limits are almost 
absolute ; she moves narrowly within ever the same bitter-sweet views of life and 
death, expressed with the same marvellous swiftness and felicity of phrase, turning 
its pathos with a wit like flame, and touching every glimpse of love or joy with a sad 
playfulness that is almost mockery.' 

The Independent. 
' Another reason, perhaps, why we fail to readily understand and to be impressed 
by the poem ["A Wall Between"] as a whole, is that we are delayed in reading it 
by the startling excellence of parts, isolated passages, and lines, which are unfor- 
gettably fine : — 

" Fair sir, if you would help a woman die. 
Show me a glass. There! that one look will wring 
My heart, I think, out of its place. 
The earth may take my face." 



lO 

" And there is no remembrance in the grave ; 
That comforts one. Better it is to lie, 

Not knowing thistles grow above, 
Thaji to remember love." 

. . . ''As the tree falls, one says, 
So shall it lie. It falls, remembering 

The snn and stillness of its leaf-green da^'s. 
The moons it held, the nested bird's warm wing, 
The promise of the buds it wore. 
The fruit — it never bore." 

A weak writer she is not, and an imitative writer she could not be, if she tried. 



POEMS IN COMPANY WITH CHILDREN. 

By Sarah M. B. Piatt. 
I Vol. 16 /no. $1.00. 

Illustrated by Jlliss L. B. Hia/iphry, Jessie Curtis, and Robert Leiuis. 
Published by D. LOTHROP & CO., Boston, Mass. 



The New York Tribune. (Dr. George Ripley.) 
' The maternal sentiment which forms the inspiration of this volume is relieved of 
its homely household flavour in blending with the ideal, grand, and impassioned 
fancies of its exquisite poems. Not less admirable for their suggestiveness of thought 
and originality of expression, than for their deep womanly feeling, they appeal to the 
heart of the lovers of poetry, as well as the lovers of children. Mrs. Piatt rarely 
finds it necessary to adapt her themes or her language to the supposed capacity of 
her young listeners, but takes it for granted that they will enjoy true poetry better 
than the affected baby-talk of so many doting mothers. Hence the volume will find 
favour with a large circle of mature readers, as well as with the juvenile audience 
for whom it was especially designed, but who, of course, cannot fully enter into the 
subtle conceptions and dainty imagery of many of the poems. . . . The singular 
merit of the volume is no doubt derived, in the first instance, from the feminine 
experience which it rehearses, but its magic of expression and illustration is the fruit 
of choice culture and rare poetic gifts.' 

The Atlantic Monthly. 
'The dramatic power with which each little scene and situation is realised, is of 
rare quality ; the mental attitude of childhood is perfectly caught ; and in reading 
the poems you hear the solemn voices, you see the wide, serious eyes, you feel the 
clinging, detaining little hands. . . . "Poems in Company with Children "is 
not, perhaps, a book for children ; we doubt if they would understand it, or care for 
it ; but all who care for them must feel what a beautiful and unique study of child- 
hood it is, — of childhood unconscious, and in its truest and most winged moods and 
poses.' 

The Cincinnati Times. (Prof. W. H. Venable.) 

'Who but Mrs. Piatt could write that charming piece called "The Master of the 
House," so happily and daintily describing " The Baby"? Who but she could write 
"About a Magician," so vividly photographing old Father Time and his mysterious 
power? What subtle, yet simple, tearful humour and truth in " The Sad Story of a 



1 1 

Little Girl " ! . . . The poem called " A Coat of Arms " is full of versatile force. 
A little girl tells her mother she wants a coat-of-arms : — 

"Ah ! — other people have such things V 

Tell Rose you have the blood of kings, 
And show it when you blush, my girl !" 

The mother names a long line of great and famous princes, from Alfred and Lear to 
Victoria and Kaiser William, 

"There, I can prove your family ties 

Bind you to all the great, I trust ; 
Its founder lived in Paradise, 

And his ancestor was — the Dust. 
Can Rose say more? Your ancient tree 

Must hold a sword of fire (its root 
Down in the very grave must be) 

With serpent and — forbidden fruit." 

" Hiding the Baby," — hiding from "The Old Man going by," the old man Time, is 
as fascinating and dramatic as it is original. "The Gift of Empty Hands" is a 
beautiful fairy tale, beautifully told, for the ennobling of ambitious youth.' 

The Cincinnati Commercial. 

' Among these graver pieces there are also interspersed others of a more gay and 
airy kind. It is here, and here alone, in her writings, that the author's unmistake- 
able vein of humour is discovered. "The Funeral of a Doll," "My Artist," and 
" Playing Beggars," are lit up with a delightful and exquisite gleam of smiles. The 
poet, it is manifest, has dwelt within the actual world of infantine and youthful 
spirits. She has drawn her inspiration from living eyes and voices, and no household 
of children has ever been more beautifully commemorated.' 

Springfield (Mass.) Republican. 
' " Playing Beggars" is a delicious bit of infantile drama.' 



' Charming little books that make a Dainty Pair.' — Eminent English Critic. 

'^ Quality and not quantity is what ive ask for from the poet, a7id some of the 
loveliest poems in the lafiguage are also anioiig the briefest. Here are two tiny 
volumes that deserve a word of praise from the critic and recognition from the 
public' — London Illustrated News, June 20, 1885. 

AN IRISH GARLAND. By Sarah M. B. Piatt. 

Small Crown %vo. Cloth, gilt top. 

Published in the United States by HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & Co., 
Boston and New York, Price Si. 00 : in Great Britain, v,\ DAVID 
DOUGLAS, Edinburgh, 3s. 6d. 



The Scotsman (Edinburgh), Dec. 23, 1884. 
' A very dainty volume of poems by an American lady who is well known on the 
other side of the Atlantic as a writer of singular grace and beauty. The small 
collection of poems which Mrs. Piatt has gathered together under the title of "An 
Irish Garland " derives much of its charm from an entire absence of pretentiousness 
of any and every kind. Her verse is simple in character, and the sentiment is 



1 2 

always true and pure in tone, tlie natural outcome of a sensitive and delicate nature. 
There is a peculiar charm in the short poem entitled " In Clonmel Parish Church- 
yard," and another poem, "The Confession of My Neighbour" gives us one of 
those instinctive glimpses into a woman's heart which is apt to escape man's grosser 
vision.* 

The Academy, March 21, 1885. 

' This is a charming little book, and we could wish it were much longer. Rarely, 
indeed, has so much thought and feeling been put Into verse of the secondary order 
with more flow and felicity of diction. . . . We can sincerely recommend Mrs. 
Piatt's pretty, thoughtful, and tuneful volume.' 

The Telegram (New York), February 23, 1885. 

' Incalculably more precious than many large books of poetry, so-called.' 
The Saturday Review, July 11, 1885. 

* Mrs. Piatt's slender volume risks overlooking by its mere slightness. It con- 
tains one poem, "The Gift of Tears," which for deep-hearted suggestiveness and 
concentrated pathos might have proceeded from Mrs. Browning. The kinship we 
claim for it is no light thing, and it is not lightly claimed.' 
The Graphic, July n, 1885. 

'Pathos distinguishes the best pieces, such as, "On the Pier at Queenstown," 
and "The Confession of My Neighbour," but there is a vein of quaint humour in 
places, as in a charming little childlike poem, "Comfort through a Window.'" 
The Pilot (Boston), April 18, 1885. 

' It is charming without as within, in its beautiful covering of robin's egg blue, 
with a pretty little gold harp and shamrock on the corner of the cover. . . . Apart 
from its outspoken love of Ireland, for which we must surely love it, the " Irish 
Garland" appeals to pure humanity on every page. . . . Ought to endear her to 
every Irish heart.' __^ 

THE CHILDREN OUT-OF-DOORS. 

A BOOK OF VERSES. By Two in One House. 

Suiall Crown '^vo. Cloth, gilt top. 

Published in the United States by ROBERT CLARKE & CO., Cincinnati, 

Price $1.25 ; in Great Britain by DAVID DOUGLAS, Edinburgh, 3s. 6d. 

The Atlantic Monthly, April 1885. 

' The authors of the charming book of verse called "The Children Out-of-Doors " 
are, of course, Mr. and Mrs. Piatt. Though their names do not appear on the title- 
page, their work is too characteristic to pass unrecognised.' 

The Christian Union, January 29, 1885. 

' The tender sympathy with homeless and destitute children evinced in the first 
poem is the key-note of the collection. The knowledge of child-nature is as striking 
as its expression is delicate and poetic. Whether looked at from a literary or a 
religious standpoint, these poems are charming and helpful in a high degree.' 
The Academy, March 21, 1885. 

' Very tender are some of these slight lyrics, and . . . they have a charm of feeling 
that is altogether their own. Delicate sensibility, adequate powers of rhythmic 
e-vpression, and wholesome sentiment, distinguish them.' 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 

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